Shrillblog

Call me "Rip"

2011-03-30T17:05:00.000-07:00

We're in the news again! Anyone want to play a game of "let's cut the national pension system's budget by 30% or it will be forced to cut its budget by 30%?"

Christy Romer Joins the Order of the Shrill

2011-03-23T23:42:00.000-07:00

Another new inductee:

Christy Romer in Vanderbilt, by Brad DeLong: Soon she too will join the Order of the Shrill:

Former top economist: Economic inaction ‘shameful’: President Obama’s former top economic advisor sharply criticized the federal government for failing to take more aggressive action against unemployment.

I frankly don’t understand why policy makers aren’t more worried about the suffering of real families. I think there are tools we have tools we have that we can use, and I think it’s shameful that we’re not using them...

“We need to realize that there is still a lot of devastation out there,” Romer said, calling the 8.9% unemployment rate "an absolute crisis."

If I have a complaint about policy these days, it’s that we’re not doing enough. That goes all the way up to the Federal Reserve, [which] could be taking more aggressive action. It goes to the Congress and the Administration – there are fiscal policy actions they could be taking. And don’t tell me you can’t [take those actions] because of the deificit because I think there are fiscally responsible ways...

Romer suggested that extending the payroll tax break to the employer side of the payroll tax could spur the economy; she suggested that Congress simultaneously pass a comprehensive, long-term plan for reducing the deficit.

Ryan Avent Joins the Order of the Shrill

2011-03-21T00:13:00.000-07:00

Brad DeLong inducts a new member:

Ryan Avent Makes so Much Sense That He Joins the Order of the Shrill, by Brad DeLong: Ryan Avent:

Guns and butter: About that deficit: MARK THOMA has an appropriately succint post up today which reads in its entirety (and I hope he'll forgive my quoting the whole thing):

We have enough money to pay for military action in Libya, but not for job creation?

It's hard not to be cynical about government policymaking.... [B]oth Republicans and Democrats are committed to cutting the government's budget in the current fiscal year... threaten programmes with positive economic returns.... [F]ew party leaders are seriously discussing new spending on programmes with positive economic returns. America has substantial infrastructure needs—current spending is inadequate to simply maintain critical infrastructure at its current state of repair—and yet the odds of passing a new transportation law to replace the one that was scheduled to expire in 2009 but which has since been extended repeatedly, well, they're close to zero. Why? No one can agree on a way to fund new infrastructure spending.

Libya poses no threat to America. It's far from clear that American intervention will yield positive outcomes for Libyans. And yet here America goes, launching massively expensive sorties....

[M]uch of official Washington—Democratic and Republican leaders, along with policy intellectuals and op-ed pages—has acted as though an immediate fiscal crunch loomed. This was never true. American debt levels may be an issue by the end of the decade, but they aren't now, and deficits are forecast to fall sharply for the next few years. Bond yields have rarely been lower. The fiscal problem is long-term, not short-term. And yet dire fiscal scenarios have been used to sell painful short-term cuts, some of which were necessary but could have been accomplished later, many of which weren't necessary at all. Americans have been told, by the president of the United States and his chief Republican antagonists, that in hard times the government, like households, must tighten its belt. And then along comes Libya to put the lie to all of these assertions.

The really, really troubling thing about this is that Washington will almost certainly ignore the inconsistency. I doubt any pundits will take the opportunity to observe that Washington leaders apparently don't actually believe that America faces immediate fiscal constraints (as it does not)...

He is, of course, completely correct.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Ryan Avent R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!!

David Brooks is Shrill!

2010-01-03T02:27:00.000-08:00

Bobo goes bananas!

Resilient societies have a level-headed understanding of the risks inherent in this kind of warfare.

But, of course, this is not how the country has reacted over the past week. There have been outraged calls for Secretary Janet Napolitano of the Department of Homeland Security to resign, as if changing the leader of the bureaucracy would fix the flaws inherent in the bureaucracy. There have been demands for systemic reform — for more protocols, more layers and more review systems.

Much of the criticism has been contemptuous and hysterical. Various experts have gathered bits of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s biography. Since they can string the facts together to accurately predict the past, they thunder, the intelligence services should have been able to connect the dots to predict the future.

Dick Cheney argues that the error was caused by some ideological choice. Arlen Specter screams for more technology — full-body examining devices. “We thought that had been remedied,” said Senator Kit Bond, as if omniscience could be accomplished with legislation.

Many people seem to be in the middle of a religious crisis of faith. All the gods they believe in — technology, technocracy, centralized government control — have failed them in this instance.

Well, David, may we suggest it's time for a different god? Hastur is accepting supplicants over in conference room 3.

James Kwak: A Partisan Post: You Have Been Warned!

2009-12-11T09:22:00.001-08:00

A Partisan Post, You Have Been Warned « The Baseline ScenarioLast night I read a post by Brad DeLong that made me so mad I had trouble falling asleep. (Not at DeLong, mind you.) There’s really nothing unusual in there — hysteria about the deficit, people who voted for the Bush tax cuts and the unfunded Medicare prescription drug benefit but suddenly think the national debt is killing us, political pandering — but maybe it was the proverbial straw.

First, let me say that I largely agree with DeLong here:

I am–in normal times–a deficit hawk. I think the right target for the deficit in normal times is zero, with the added provision that when there are foreseeable future increases in spending shares of GDP we should run a surplus to pay for those foreseeable increases in an actuarially-sound manner. I think this because I know that there will come abnormal times when spending increases are appropriate. And I think that the combination of (a) actuarially-sound provision for future increases in spending shares and (b) nominal balance for the operating budget in normal times will create the headroom for (c) deficit spending in emergencies when it is advisable while (d) maintaining a non-explosive path for the debt as a whole.”

Now, let me tell you what I am sick of:

People who insist that the recent change in our fiscal spending is the product of high spending, without looking at the numbers, because their political priors are so strong they assume that high deficits under a Democratic president must be due to runaway spending. And it’s not just Robert Samuelson.
People who forecast the end of the world without pointing out why the world is ending. Here’s Niall Ferguson, in an article entitled “An Empire at Risk:” “The deficit for the fiscal year 2009 came in at more than $1.4 trillion—about 11.2 percent of GDP, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). That’s a bigger deficit than any seen in the past 60 years—only slightly larger in relative terms than the deficit in 1942.” But does he mention that the reason for the 2009 deficit is lower tax revenues due to the financial crisis and recession? No. Here’s Ferguson on the 10-year projection: “Meanwhile, in dollar terms, the total debt held by the public (excluding government agencies, but including foreigners) rises from $5.8 trillion in 2008 to $14.3 trillion in 2019—from 41 percent of GDP to 68 percent.” Does he mention that, as early as January 2008, that number was projected to fall to 22%, and the majority of the change is due to lower tax revenues? No.
People who posture about our fiscal crisis who voted for the Bush tax cuts — shouldn’t shame require them to keep silent?
People who say, like Judd Gregg, “after the possibility of a terrorist getting a weapon of mass destruction and using it against us somewhere here in the United States, the single biggest threat that we face as a nation is the fact that we’re on a course toward fiscal insolvency,” as if this is a new problem, when it’s been around since 2004 (see Figure 1) — when, I might add, Judd Gregg was a member of the majority. (Tell me, was Niall Ferguson forecasting the end of the American empire in 2004, when everything he says now about long-term entitlement spending was already true? That’s a real question.)
People who say that we can’t pass health care reform because it costs too much, ignoring the fact that the CBO projects the bills to be roughly deficit neutral, ignoring the fact that the Senate bill has received bipartisan health-economist support for its cost-cutting measures, and ignoring the fact that our long-term fiscal problem is, and always has been, about health care costs (see Figure 2).
People who say the Obama administration is weak on the deficit (Ferguson refers to Obama’s “indecision on the deficit”, and he is gentle by Republican standards), when by tackling health care costs head-on — and in the process angering their political base — they are doing the absolute most important thing necessary to solve the long-term debt problem.
People who cite “financial ruin” purely, absolutely, incontrovertibly as a political tactic to try to kill health care reform (courtesy of DeLong and Brian Beutler)...
Joe Lieberman.

Dean Baker, Yog-Sothoth Professor of Political Economy at Miskatonic University, on the Washington Post and the Stimulus

2009-10-11T11:19:00.001-07:00

Beat the Press Archive | The American Prospect: Given the quality of the economics reporting, parents would be well-advised to prohibit their children from reading the Washington Post so that they don't get confused on basic arithmetic concepts. The Post doesn't want more stimulus and is willing to say anything to push its case.

The lead editorial tells readers that: "government has managed to blunt the recession, but at a cost -- a higher national debt burden, which future Americans must pay off by working harder and saving more than they otherwise would have." Actually, future Americans will own the debt that will be paid off. This is not a generational issue, it can be a distributional one.

There is a point that some of the debt is held by foreigners. This will be a burden on the country, but the issue here is the trade deficit, not the budget deficit. If we had no government debt, but foreigners bought up $4 trillion of private capital in the United States, it would pose the same burden on future generations as if foreigners bought up $4 trillion of government debt. Remarkably, the Post is not concerned about the trade deficit and the burden it poses on future generations and actually does not want the cause of the deficit -- the over-valued dollar-- to be fixed.

The Post also gives the bizarre argument that:we should wait on further stimulus because "the government still hasn't run through half of the $787 billion in tax cuts and spending increases enacted this year." Of course, for those of us who passed our third grade arithmetic class this argument is just plain silly.

The stimulus is already being disbursed at its maximum rate and therefore having its full impact on the economy. The additional spending will provide no further boost.

To see this point, imagine my rich uncle promises to give me $2,400 over two years in installments of $100 a month. I may originally be slow to change my consumption, but after 3 or 4 months I will likely have fully adjusted my spending in accordance with this monthly gift of $100. Once I have reached the 8th month, I will almost certainly be at my maximum spending rate, even though two thirds of the gift is yet to come.

This is where we stand right now. We have spent close to 40 percent of the stimulus with more than 60 percent yet to come, however the rate of spending will not be increasing from this point forward. Therefore, it will provide no further net boost to the economy. People who write editorials for major newspapers should understand this fact.

It is worth noting that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections showing a 10.2 percent unemployment rate for 2010 and a 9.1 percent rate for 2011 include the impact of the stimulus. Perhaps the Post's editors know something that CBO doesn't, in which case they should share this information with their readers.

Miskatonic University Bulletin: Fall 2009

2009-10-10T14:35:00.001-07:00

The leaves are turning here in Arkham, Massachusetts, as we welcome to his padded cell our new Dread Cthulhu Professor Health Policy, Thomas Levenson. Watch his mad ululations beneath the uncaring stars:

It’s not that McArdle can’t read... it’s that she can’t (won’t) think: part four (and last, thank FSM). « The Inverse Square Blog: OK, by now it’s clear that this is overkill. One post by Megan McArdle does not need this kind of rant; it’s like using a howitzer to plink a tin can off a fence. [For grotesque demonstration of my logorrhea problem, check out parts one, two, and three of this series]

But in some sense, all I’m doing is channelling my inner John Foster Dulles: McArdle, and her ilk are not going away. Sadly, no amount of day-by-day debunking seems able to evoke the kind of respect for their claimed craft that would produce even a smidgeon more care and honor in their ongoing attempt to write into reality their unexamined assumptions. So, after Dulles, consider this a kind of blogospheric massive retaliation, an attempt to shock and awe the recalcitrant into the virtues of intellectual honesty.

Which brings us to one more thing that McArdle did not do in her attempt to recruit what she claims as the gold-standard of authority, the academic literature, to bolster her assertion that any attempt to control drug expenditures in the US medical system is tantamount to a pact to kill nice old people...

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Levenson R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!!

David Frum is Shrill!

2009-08-25T22:05:00.004-07:00

Former Bush speech-writer David Frum is, dare we say it, Shrill and Unbalanced!

All this hysterical and provocative talk invites, incites, and prepares a prefabricated justification for violence.
And indeed some conservative broadcasters are lovingly anticipating just such an outcome.
...
Newt Gingrich tweeted: "The person who drafted the outrageous homeland security memo smearing veterans and conservatives should be fired."
I don't think the former speaker could tweet such a thing today in good conscience. The person who drafted that homeland security memo has gained very good reason to be worried. The guns are coming out. The risks are real.
It's not enough for conservatives to repudiate violence, as some are belatedly beginning to do. We have to tone down the militant and accusatory rhetoric.

David, welcome!

Joe Klein is losing it

2009-08-20T11:20:00.002-07:00

Time was we'd expect Joe Klein to reliably mutter something about being liberal before launching into a broadside against everyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. This time is past:

...The most liberal members of the Democratic caucus — Senator Russ Feingold in the Senate, Representative Dennis Kucinich in the House, to name two — are honorable public servants who make their arguments based on facts. They don't retail outright lies. Hyperbole and distortion certainly exist on the left, but they are a minor chord in the Democratic Party.
It is a very different story among Republicans. To be sure, there are honorable conservatives, trying to do the right thing. There is a legitimate, if wildly improbable, fear that Obama's plan will start a process that will end with a health-care system entirely controlled by the government. There are conservatives — Senator Lamar Alexander, Representative Mike Pence, among many others — who make their arguments based on facts. But they have been overwhelmed by nihilists and hypocrites more interested in destroying the opposition and gaining power than in the public weal. ... There is no Republican health-care alternative in 2009. The same people who rail against a government takeover of health care tried to enforce a government takeover of Terri Schiavo's end-of-life decisions. And when Palin floated the "death panel" canard, the number of prominent Republicans who rose up to call her out could be counted on one hand.
A striking example of the prevailing cravenness was Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia, who has authored end-of-life counseling provisions and told the Washington Post that comparing such counseling to euthanasia was nuts — but then quickly retreated when he realized that he had sided with the reality-based community against his Rush Limbaugh-led party. ... Why are these men so reluctant to be rational in public?

Nonpartisan Tax Professor Dan Shaviro Is Now Shrill!

2009-08-19T09:25:00.001-07:00

Welcome, Dan! Phnglui mglwnafh Cthulhu Rlyeh wgahnagl Ftagn!! The deep-fried shoggoth tentacles are on the right. And the 65 million B.C. vintage of the chardonnay is from Hastur the Unspeakable's private cellars...

Start Making Sense: Healthcare reform: The current debate's lack of coherent content has been quite startling, and indeed dismaying insofar as one naively hoped for better. I generally support what the Obama Administration is trying to do (though sometimes what that is, isn't entirely clear). In 1993, I was unsympathetic to the Clinton plan, but since then my view of how well the U.S. healthcare market functions has darkened. More on that in a moment. Unfortunately, I don't think the Administration has conveyed any clear sense of what it is trying to do, or why. Concerning the other side in the debate, perhaps the less said, the better. I really can't say anything temperate at this point. What is the set of problems to which the Administration's healthcare reform proposals might, with luck, be an at least partial solution? Brad DeLong once put the point quite crisply (in his moderate rather than shrill persona). To liberal economists, the big problem is adverse selection. To conservative economists, the big problem is moral hazard. And I myself would say they're both right, plus there also are externalities. On adverse selection: Anyone who is facing uncertain healthcare expenses ought to want insurance, smoothing out the actual cost towards the expected cost. Our healthcare market does not work well to solve this problem, and that's a big reason for the millions of uninsured. The tax subsidy for employer-provided insurance contributes to this, by making risk pooling much harder for the people left over after these generally healthier groups have been cherry-picked out of the pool (so to speak). Adverse selection, making fairly priced insurance unavailable, is inherently a big problem in healthcare if the government doesn't somehow mandate pooling, given that people often will know more about their expected future health than insurance company doctors will be able to learn. But the system created by tax benefits certainly has made things worse. Myopic or irrational failure to insure (until it is too late) when one should have also is a problem. Likewise, the prospect of free care in the ER if one has a crisis may create an individually rational reason for under-insurance, but involving a fiscal externality. When you count as well the adverse effect on risk-pooling of people's staying out of the insurance market (contributing to adverse selection), there's a good case for mandating health insurance coverage, just as Social Security effectively mandates retirement savings. >There is an argument on the other side - why give me (or make me buy) something that costs $X if I value it at less than $X - but while that's often a good argument I personally would reject it on balance here. Note, however, that this argument applies equally to making me buy something for $X and giving it to me for free (since in that case we could simply have given me the $X instead). And the question of whether I pay the $X or get it for free is simply an input to the overall issue of post-tax and transfer wealth distribution in the society (which is not to diminish its importance, but just to put it in the proper larger context). >And finally, mixed in with adverse selection (though conceptually distinct) is that we may favor redistribution from those facing low expected healthcare costs to those facing high expected costs, in particular to the extent that brute luck rather than choice underlies the difference. Thus, mandatory insurance for which everyone was charged the same amount might be defended as combining a solution to adverse selection with a deliberative redistributive policy. By the way, lest this sound a bit lefty, it is distributionally equivalent to what the George H.W. Bush Administration would have proposed it if Bush I had won the 1992 election, via risk-adjusted subsidies for the purchase of private health insurance. >OK, on to moral hazard. One key reason the U.S. healthcare system is so wildly expensive relative to the benefits provided (where the comparison is other economically advanced countries, where people get comparably good healthcare for much less) is that we have half of a free market system, in effect - which can be worse than no market system at all. Consumer demand drives the market, but it is largely the demand of subsidized consumers who are not actually paying at the margin for what they get. Suppose that in the market for groceries or cars we had consumer demand in the driver's seat (as we do), except that people didn't actually have to pay for what they purchased (or maybe they just had a small co-pay). Whole Foods and GM might like this, but it wouldn't be good socially. Yet in healthcare, that's effectively what we have, much of the time, for people on Medicare, Medicaid, or employer-provided health insurance that overpays at the margin (relative to the optimal insurance level) due to the distorting effect of the tax subsidy. Perhaps the food or cars analogy overstates the problem in a couple of respects. Good food and cars are fun in themselves, getting healthcare isn't and hence I'd generally only do it out of the belief that my health will benefit. Plus, doctors to a large extent tell healthcare consumers what to do. But the latter is actually a big part of the problem - they don't bear the marginal costs either, and have some reasons of both ideology and self-interest (earn more fees or practice overly defensive medicine) for recommending treatments that aren't actually worth their cost to the patient. So we have a terrible healthcare system that surely could be vastly improved. I take the Administration to be addressing the adverse selection problem by extending health insurance to the uninsured population. Also, it may want to address under-treatment of this population (which exists alongside over-treatment of others), which I think of as a distributional issue, because being sick and treatable, but unable to afford the treatment, should raise one's estimate of the marginal utility that a transfer via free provision of the needed service would provide. The Administration would also perhaps like to address the moral hazard problem, which is a key input to the horrendous problems of long-term fiscal unsustainability that the U.S. currently faces. Many observers are skeptical, I would guess rightly, of the progress that the current proposal would make on this front. Unfortunately, addressing it really requires bipartisanship, since cutting benefits is politically unpopular. And the Republicans couldn't make any clearer their unwillingness to cooperate in any sort of good faith effort to address waste and put healthcare outlays on a sustainable path. One of the many offensive and odious aspects of the Republicans' hateful lying about death panels and the like is that they are actually the ones who want to provide less treatment. For those among them who are sane and believe in civil society, this mainly reflects concern about moral hazard and/or a libertarian distributional view. The rest, apparently a large majority of their number, do not bear discussing.

Spencer Ackerman's Sober, Measured Take on John Yoo

2009-07-17T09:41:00.001-07:00

A measured, appropriate, sober take: >John Yoo’s Defense of Himself Is as Persuasive as Most of His Legal Opinions: This is your horrible, dystopian future: John Yoo, the former Office of Legal Counsel official who had a hand in crafting the Bush administration’s detentions, interrogations and warrantless surveillance abuses, writes endless and endlessly misleading defenses of himself. Some people die because of Yoo’s cavalier relationship with the law — about 100, actually — and others get law school sinecures and limitless op-ed real estate to explain away what they did. Few people write so much for so long with so little self-reflection. You’ll be reading these op-eds in the nursing home. Yoo’s latest comes in response to Friday’s report from five inspectors general about the warrantless surveillance and data-mining escapades of the Bush administration. Welcome to your future. >Yoo starts things off with his typical flourish of disingenuousness: >>Suppose an al Qaeda cell in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles was planning a second attack using small arms, conventional explosives or even biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. Our intelligence and law enforcement agencies faced a near impossible task locating them. Now suppose the National Security Agency (NSA), which collects signals intelligence, threw up a virtual net to intercept all electronic communications leaving and entering Osama bin Laden’s Afghanistan headquarters. What better way of detecting follow-up attacks? And what president — of either political party — wouldn’t immediately order the NSA to start, so as to find and stop the attackers? >>Evidently, none of the inspectors general of the five leading national security agencies would approve. >Those inspectors general, in Yoo’s imagination, aren’t overworked bureaucrats in wrinkle-free shirts, cotton Dockers and overgrown haircuts, buried under endless reams of paper. They’re useful idiots for Osama bin Laden. In truth, the reason why the inspectors general don’t entertain that scenario is because it’s absurd. If the intelligence community knew what the “electronic communications” signatures heading into and out of Osama bin Laden’s Afghanistan headquarters were, they could very easily obtain warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, because they’d possess individualized suspicion. This is an unproblematic case, fitting easily under the aegis of the law on Sept. 12, 2001. It has absolutely nothing to do with what the inspectors general call the “President’s Surveillance Program.” That’s also why the battery of Justice Department leaders like Acting Attorney General Jim Comey, Associate Attorney General Jack Goldsmith, FBI Director Robert Mueller and Associate Deputy Attorney General Patrick Philbin fought to rein in the surveillance activities — because they were overbroad and outside of FISA, which Congress explicitly made the “exclusive means” for conducting legal foreign surveillance. Yoo continues: >>It is absurd to think that a law like FISA should restrict live military operations against potential attacks on the United States. >Actually, it’s absurd to think that a law like FISA does. Yoo cites the 9/11 Commission, saying it found that “FISA’s wall between domestic law enforcement and foreign intelligence” proved to be such a hindrance, but that’s a misrepresentation. FISA has no such wall. The “wall” was an invention of the Justice Department under Janet Reno to separate foreign-collected surveillance from criminal investigations, nothing even close to “live military operations,” and in practice that bureaucratic restriction went too far and inhibited necessary FBI-CIA collaboration. The Bush administration’s response wasn’t to get Congress to change FISA; it was to entirely circumvent it. >>Clearly, the five inspectors general were responding to the media-stoked politics of recrimination, not consulting the long history of American presidents who have lived up to their duty in times of crisis. More than a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt authorized the FBI to intercept any communications, domestic or international, of persons “suspected of subversive activities . . . including suspected spies.” >You know what law, passed in 1978, didn’t exist when FDR was president? Yoo goes even further, and takes selective quotations from Jefferson and Hamilton to suggest that his long-discredited theory that presidents have king-like powers during times of war, and yet he never comes out and says it, because even in The Wall Street Journal people can recognize absurdity. >What’s amazing about Yoo’s caustic attack on the inspectors general report is that the report itself embarrasses Yoo but does little else. There’s no suggestion of prosecution, no recommendation of additional investigation, no harsh language. It says simply that Yoo says what he says in this op-ed and that his superiors at OLC were cut out of that loop. That’s all. Yoo’s not even in danger, if reports about Attorney General Eric Holder’s potential new investigation are to be believed, of moving into the crosshairs of the Justice Department. Today’s attack on the inspectors general is Yoo’s response to having his own words quoted back at him. Which, perhaps, is insult enough. It’s like seeing the next 30 years of your life unfold before your horrified eyes.

Tom Levenson, Driven into Shrillness by Tom Friedman Once More...

2009-07-15T08:47:00.001-07:00

Dog Bites Man: Tom Friedman Mischaracterizes US Interventions. « The Inverse Square Blog: Atrios sent me in search of Tom Friedman’s latest, and, like its author, it’s a bizarre piece of work. Backstory: back in the dawn of time, when giants still walked the earth (Mays in center field; McCovey at first base, Marichal on the mound), and humans preserved their communications in scratches on clay, Tom Friedman was a real reporter and a good one. He spent time in country, he worked sources, he could write. Somewhere along the line, though, during the Clinton years, I believe, he seems to have convinced himself that his wealth of experience had given him the key to all mythologies. Hence such trifles as his “argument” that we should invade Iraq to show that the US could punch somebody,[1] the endless iteration of “Friedman Units” and so on. And now, with the war in Iraq now in its Pilate phase... Friedman comes up with a column that captures so many of his deficiencies in one place. There is the complete abandonment of the reportorial function. He doesn’t talk to folks, he tags along (his phrase) with US JCS Chairman Admiral McMullen. Nice company, to be sure, but not that in which you will find unvarnished opinions being expressed. He doesn’t seem even interested in testing his assumptions against any possibility of contrary information anymore: >In the dining hall on the main base, I like to watch the Iraqi officers watching the melting pot of U.S. soldiers around them — men, women, blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics — and wonder: What have they learned from us? Wonder? WONDER? You’re a journalist — or rather you used to be! You don’t blow wonder through your ass. You go find out what they have learned from us. But no…that would be (a) heavy lifting and (b) dangerous... so much so that it might render this kind of conclusion not merely pathetic, but simply unsayable: >We left some shameful legacies here of torture and Abu Ghraib, but we also left a million acts of kindness and a profound example of how much people of different backgrounds can accomplish when they work together. Well, how much have we and they accomplished? Some, I’m sure…... ut given this kind of news, buried in what used to be called the b section, but popping up with depressing regularity, perhaps not as much as Friedman’s breezy tour with the brass may indicate. And in any event — how is it possible that a Serious Foreign Policy Thinker™ no matter how burnt out, overly comfortable, and generally hackified could actually bring himself to write such a Hallmark Card notion: that the events of the last six years (12 F.U.s, if you’re counting) are coming to rest in a satisfactory state because, hey, we can all work together? I guess there is a thread of naivete left to me. I grew up thinking that there was something special about the New York Times. I met Tony Lukas when I was 18, Tony Lewis some time later — and people like that impressed me for the fire they had, that seemed to come from that newsroom. You didn’t get comfortable there, it seemed to my juvenile eyes. Even when you got big, you felt the pressure the place forcing you to make that last call to get it right. I know that’s a fantasy, and I’m sure it was never as true as I wanted it to be. And even with the decline of the Times (Judith Miller, anyone... Ross freaking Douthat?) it’s still better than the whatever that other emblem of journalistic moxie, the Post has become. But that’s kind of like saying that liver is better than spam… But still... Friedman could once actually do the job he mails in now. It’s painful to watch. He should pack it in. Otherwise it’s just going to go ever further down hill. For, in this column as in this post, he and I save the best/worst for last. If Friedman hopes to hang on above Kristol territory, he has to find a way to stop writing stuff like this: >After we invaded and stabilized Bosnia, we didn’t just toss their competing factions the keys. Except, of course, we did not invade Bosnia. The American led NATO intervention in the Bosnian War occured in 1995, just as Friedman was making his ultimately disastrous move to the NYTime’s Opinion pages, so he perhaps may have been distracted, but the military action taken by the US and its allies consisted of 3515 aerial sorties: a hellacious bombing campaign. If this seems like a distinction without a difference, think again: many DFHs without Friedman’s bully pulpit tried to suggest that the range of analogies being drawn to justify the Iraq War back in 2002-2003 were false. Iraq wasn’t Japan in August 1945; Bagdad was not Berlin; displacing Saddam was more like witnessing Tito’s death and the start of the Yugoslav disintegration than it was our ratification of Balkan partition in 1995 — and not much like that either. Friedman chose then not to know any historical complexity. He still does. And as he continues to scrabble to find justifications for his own disastrous cheerleading for the Iraq war, he’s willing to get basic facts wrong to prevent the slightest dissonant fact from disturbing the eternal sunshine of his mind. If it were me, or any other mere blogger, or even one of the deranged commenters at Redstate thus deluded — who cares. But despite the evident decline of even the flagship mass media organizations, the power that comes with the NYT platform and the inertial weight of Friedman’s own brand means that when he says stupid sh-t, he can get people killed. And that’s why this matters. ---- [1] From Wikipedia: >In an interview with Charlie Rose in 2003, Friedman said: >>What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?” You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This.[23][24][25] ..We could have hit Saudi Arabia. It was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That’s the real truth... >Similarly, in NPR’s Talk of the Nation, September 23, 2003: >>...and sometimes it takes a 2-by-4 across the side of the head to get that message.

And...

2009-05-21T18:02:00.001-07:00

we're back!

Shrillblog: The Israeli Edition

2008-10-03T01:40:00.004-07:00

While we here at the Order generally focus our arts upon domestic shrillness, we are not without appreciation for such activity in far away lands--and especially so when it involves a country's leader gettin' all shrill and unbalanced his own bad self. Or: Ehud Olmert is shrill and unbalanced:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview published on Monday that Israel must withdraw from nearly all of the West Bank as well as East Jerusalem to attain peace with the Palestinians and that any occupied land it held onto would have to be exchanged for the same quantity of Israeli territory.
He also dismissed as “megalomania” any thought that Israel would or should attack Iran on its own to stop it from developing nuclear weapons, saying the international community and not Israel alone was charged with handling the issue.
In an unusually frank and soul-searching interview granted after he resigned to fight corruption charges — he remains interim prime minister until a new government is sworn in — Mr. Olmert discarded longstanding Israeli defense doctrine and called for radical new thinking, in words that are sure to stir controversy as his expected successor, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, tries to build a coalition.
“What I am saying to you now has not been said by any Israeli leader before me,” Mr. Olmert told the newspaper Yediot Aharonot in the interview on the occasion of the Jewish new year, observed from Monday evening till Wednesday evening. “The time has come to say these things.”

There are some of us at the Order that believe this sort of shrillness may become a pattern of world leaders as they exit the stage, taking a strong adversarial stance agaist what they've been doing for the bulk of their political careers.

Works for us. We just like the shrill. We needs it.

Karl Rove is Shrill?

2008-09-15T22:05:00.004-07:00

No, Mr. Rove is not eligible for membership in the Order.

Republicans are Shrill!

2008-09-03T18:35:00.001-07:00

Wait, what?

Barry Ritholtz Is Shrill!!

2008-08-11T10:20:00.001-07:00

Barry Ritholtz, at The Big Picture:

The Big Picture | Really Bad Call: SubPrime Doesn't Matter, Buy Bear Stearns: What we are looking for is stupendous, horrific, jumbo money losing stupidity. Which brings us to Ben Stein.

know I swore off Stein a year ago, but I stumbled across this piece from 12 months ago, I had to remind you of exactly how myopic and, well, just plain incompetent the guy is: From August 2007 Ben Stein:

SubPrime Doesn't Matter, Buy Bear Stearns: The rate of loss in subprime mortgages keeps climbing. In time, perhaps it will double, maybe back to $67 billion. This is a large sum by absolute standards, and I would sure like to have it in my bank account. But by the metrics of a large economy, it is nothing. The total wealth of the United States is about $70 trillion. The value of the stocks listed in the United States is very roughly $15 trillion to $20 trillion. The bond market is even larger.

You can read it paragraph by paragraph and discover something wonderfully wrong in almost every sentence . . .

Really, why the hell does the NYT insist on publishing this guy? He is a political hack, a terrible economist -- and an enormous money loser. And thats this week's Really Really Bad Call...

And here is the original from Ben Stein:

Chicken Little’s Brethren, on the Trading Floor - New York Times: THE job of an economist, among many other duties, is to put things into perspective. So, because I am an economist, among other duties, here is a little perspective on the recent turmoil in the stock and bond markets.

First, when the story of this turbulence is reported, the usual explanation mainly has to do with some new loss in the subprime mortgage world — the universe of mortgages and mortgage-backed instruments related to buyers with poor credit histories or none at all.

Here is the first instance in which proportion tells us that something is out of whack:

The total mortgage market in the United States is roughly $10.4 trillion. Of that, a little over 13 percent, or about $1.35 trillion, is subprime — certainly a large sum. Of this, nearly 14 percent is delinquent, meaning late in payment or in foreclosure. Of this amount, about 5 percent is actually in foreclosure, or about $67 billion. Of this amount, according to my friends in real estate, at least about half will be recovered in foreclosure. So now we are down to losses of about $33 billion to $34 billion.

The rate of loss in subprime mortgages keeps climbing. In time, perhaps it will double, maybe back to $67 billion. This is a large sum by absolute standards, and I would sure like to have it in my bank account.

But by the metrics of a large economy, it is nothing. The total wealth of the United States is about $70 trillion. The value of the stocks listed in the United States is very roughly $15 trillion to $20 trillion. The bond market is even larger.

Much more to the point, the fears and terrors about subprime mortgages have helped knock off 6.7 percent of the stock market’s value in recent weeks. This amounts to about $1.1 trillion, or more than 30 times the losses so far in the subprime market. In other words, these subprime losses are wildly out of all proportion to the likely damage to the economy from the subprime problems.

The disconnect goes even further. The Dow Jones industrial average has been heavily moved by fears about the subprime market. But how are most of the Dow 30 affected by subprime mortgages in any meaningful way? No Dow company is short of liquidity, and consumer spending is still strong.

Foreign stocks, especially in developing countries, have been hard hit, and this is supposedly connected with a “repricing of risk,” which in turn is connected with subprime mortgages. But how are the risks in Thailand or Brazil or Indonesia intrinsically related to problems in a housing tract in Las Vegas? The developing countries are fantastically strong and liquid. Why should problems at a mortgage company in Long Island have anything to do with them?

European stocks have also been hard hit, and this has to do with relatively small amounts of subprime in some European banks. On a global scale, the numbers in Germany and France are minuscule for subprime exposure. For European markets to fall on subprime issues makes no sense.

News last Thursday that a small amount of unpriceable subprime mortgages was in a BNP Paribas fund in France sent the markets in Europe and the United States sharply lower. Why? The losses in France are at most in the single billions, while the losses in United States markets alone were in the hundreds of billions on the BNP news.

Then there is the supposed “drying up” of credit for private equity deals because of fears of risk. But this is also puzzling. I can’t think of a single recent major private equity deal in which the bonds have defaulted.

More to the point, suppose that all private equity deals were stalled for a year. Why should this affect the Dow? None of companies in the Dow 30 is having trouble raising cash. And suppose that all private equity deals went away for good. Taken together, they are not all that big a piece of the United States economy. Why should they put the markets of the richest nation in the world, as well as all of the world’s other markets, into turmoil?

Then let’s take a peek at Bear Stearns. This venerable and clever financial house has taken some major hits on subprime mortgages lately. That is sad for the stockholders (I am a very small stockholder), and the price of Bear Stearns stock has tumbled.

A little over a week ago, news about Bear Stearns’ liquidity issues lowered the its market value by about more than $1 billion in one day. That is a big hit to a single company, to be sure, but then came the shocker: that news also helped wipe out hundreds of billions off the total value of United States stocks.

MY point is this: I don’t know where the bottom is on subprime. I don’t know how bad the problems are at Bear. Yet I do know that the market reactions are wildly out of proportion to the real problems that have been revealed. Maybe there is some giant thing hiding in the closet that might rationalize the market’s fears. But if it’s hidden, how can the market be reacting to it in the first place?

More will be revealed, as the saying goes. But recently, investors have been selling out of all relation to what we know. Reassurances in word and deed from Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, helped calm the markets on Friday. But recent events are a disturbing commentary on the power of fear.

This economy is extremely strong. Profits are superb. The world economy is exploding with growth. To be sure, terrible problems lurk in the future: a slow-motion dollar crisis, huge Medicare deficits and energy shortages. But for now, the sell-off seems extreme, not to say nutty.

Some smart, brave people will make a fortune buying in these days, and then we’ll all wonder what the scare was about.

"He Doesn't Seem Like a Serious President"

2008-08-02T14:49:00.001-07:00

Andrew Sullivan has a shrill moment:

How Shitty Was McCain?, by Andrew Sullivan: Yes, the last couple of weeks of the campaign, even from my remote perch, were pretty uninspiring on the GOP side. Here's my brief take, for what it's worth. ... The arrogant-celebrity meme is a variation on the usual Rovian fare: empty of actual policy substance but evocative of playground loyalties and resentments. Basically, McCain called Obama a girl, to appeal to the jocks, and then called him arrogant to flatter the nerds. Paris Hilton is a two-fer. Choosing a female celebrity is integral to the usual attempt to feminize the Democrat. I could see nothing racist whatever in the message, mind you, but it was, as Weaver noted, pretty asinine.

Less asinine was McCain's two-pronged lie that Obama would rather lose a war than a campaign and that he snubbed injured troops in Germany. The former is repulsively low-life and you can tell McCain knows it because he has a weird habit of saying it and then grinning broadly and humming a little to himself as a semi-laugh. He doesn't own the statement even as he says it. The statement itself is about as uncivil as it is possible to be, close to calling him treasonous, right? And the troop snub jibe is simply, demonstrably untrue, as the McCain camp was forced to semi-concede. So McCain's main moves these past two weeks have been either childish or disgusting, and both times he has signaled he didn't really believe his own message. He doesn't seem like a serious president to me.

Kevin Drum Is Shrill

2008-07-30T18:44:00.001-07:00

He says that Dana Milbank needs to be moved to the class of people who have jumped the shark, nuked the fridge, become an ex-journalist. I agree.

Kevin:

The Washington Monthly: PAGING MAUREEN DOWD....I saw this Dana Milbank piece last night but didn't bother commenting because it was late and life is too short. Milbank occasionally does good work, but basically he's ruined himself by his relentless quest to turn himself into the Washington Post's Maureen Dowd, and this piece was right in the Dowdian strike zone: snotty, too clever by half, and self-consciously bursting with adolescent cynical detachment. If Dowd were the only person who wrote this stuff it would be bad enough, but the fact that she's influenced a whole generation of wannabes is what really makes her style so malign.

At any rate, it turns out that Milbank's piece is not only snotty, too clever by half, and self-consciously bursting with adolescent cynical detachment, it's also wrong. Milbank Dowdified his Obama quote because it was the only way to get it to fit his storyline. In a bizarre and karmic way, I guess that's appropriate.

"I am Not Paid Enough to Deal with This Lying bullshit"

2008-07-11T17:59:00.001-07:00

Brad DeLong is justifiably shrill:

Every Time I Try to Crawl Out, They Pull Me Back in, by Brad DeLong!:

You know something?

I hate yelling shows.

No, that is not right:

I HATE YELLING SHOWS!

No, that is still not right:

I HATE YELLING SHOWS!!

Maybe this will do it:

I HATE YELLING

SHOWS!!!!

Called on forty minutes' notice, I trot over to the J-School studio to be a talking head on BBC/Newsnight about Fannie and Freddie. I have my talking points ready:

...[extensive list of points]...

In short, I trot over to the J-School TV studio as part of the sober, sensible, bipartisan consensus, intending to carry water for Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson.

And what do I find also on BBC/Newsnight when I get there?

I FIND THAT I AM ON WITH GROVER-FRACKING-NORQUIST!! I FIND THAT I AM ON WITH GROVER-FRACKING-NORQUIST!!! WHO HAS THREE POINTS HE WANTS TO MAKE:

Barack Obama wants to take your money by raising your taxes and pay it to the Communist Chinese.

Oil prices are high today and the economy is in a near recession because of Nancy Pelosi: before Nancy Pelosi became speaker economic growth was fine--and she is responsible for high oil prices too.

Economic growth is stalling because congress has not extended the Bush tax cuts. Congress needs to extend the Bush tax cuts, and if it does then that will fix the economy, and if it doesn't then the economy cannot recover.

I am not paid enough to deal with this lying bullshit. I am not paid enough to deal with Grover Norquist and his willful stream of defecation into the global information pool.

It is as Paul Krugman says somewhere: Grover Norquist's M.O.--George W. Bush's M.O.--the entire Republican Party's M.O. these days is (a) find a problem (i.e., financial crisis and threatening recession), (b) find something you want to do for other reasons unrelated to the problem (i.e., extend the Bush tax cuts), (c) claim without explanation that (b) will solve (a), and so (d) profit--because Peter Cardwell of BBC/Newsnight is too busy being the objective journalist referee of the yelling match to do his proper job and say:

Come, come, Mr. Norquist, are you serious? Your claim to believe that Nancy Pelosi's actions are responsible for the rise in oil prices is risible!

OK. Calm down. Adjust my meds...

Mr. Paulson? Ben? Are you there?

I have been carrying water for the two of you for a year now, as you have tried to do your jobs and contain the ongoing slow-motion financial crisis. Lots of us have been carrying water for you. Now you owe us a favor.

Will you please call John McCain Saturday morning. Call him jointly. Tell him that there is serious public business that needs to be done, and that pseudo-ideologues like Grover Norquist are not helping.

Tell him that unless he can control the swine like Grover Norquist and his ilk who work for him, that both of you are going to, Monday morning:

announce your support for Barack Obama for president

announce your change of affiliation from the Republican to the Democratic Party

You owe it. You owe it to me after that TV appearance. You owe it to all of us in the sober, sensible, bipartisan consensus. You owe it to your country. You owe it to the world.

John Scalzi: Goldberg and Bainbridge: A Compare and Contrast

2008-07-09T15:34:00.001-07:00

From the shrill John Scalzi:

Whatever » Goldberg and Bainbridge: A Compare and Contrast: Folks have been asking me in e-mail if I had any thought about Jonah Goldberg’s recent assertion in the LA Times that Barack Obama’s proposed requirement of public service for teens and college students is not unlike slavery. The answer: No, not really; once the man declared that Mussolini was really a Socialist all his life, despite ample historical evidence to the contrary (Mussolini leaving Italy’s Socialist party, founding the Fascist party as an explicit right-wing refutation of Socialism, ordering the murders of prominent Socialists and then bascially daring anyone to do something about it on the floor of the Italian parliament) I recognized that Jonah Goldberg is kind of like the conservative movement’s special younger brother, the one that drank a pint of lead-based paint at age six, utters sentences where the verbs and nouns don’t quite match up, and gets moody and throws things when you gently try to explain that actually, no, goats did not land on the moon in 1983. In this context, of course Jonah Goldberg would suggest youth public service contributes to a “slave mentality.” It would be surprising if he hadn’t, frankly. It doesn’t mean such an attention-seeking comment merits serious consideration on my part.

(No doubt Mr. Goldberg’s rejoinder to this would be to point out that the book in which he gets lots about fascism wrong has racked up some lovely sales numbers; the obvious rejoinder to this is: well, you know. At this point on its downslope into minority, the conservative movement has a lot of special younger brothers.)

That said, while I don’t want to have to unpack Goldberg’s nonsensery, I would commend to you Stephen Bainbridge’s take on Goldberg’s column, as an example of someone who is a conservative with libertarian leanings, has serious reservations about Obama’s plan, and, heck, even hauls out the “S” word, yet does not descend into paint-quaffing madness. Aside from the quality of Professor Bainbridge’s comments, it’s worth noting the small irony that Goldberg’s platform for his gouting silliness is a newspaper, while Bainbridge’s rather more sensible discussion is hosted on a blog, and yet it’s the electronic medium that gets hammered for hosting bloviating ninnies. Funny about that.

Washington Post Death Spiral Watch

2008-07-07T09:52:00.001-07:00

Matthew Yglesias: The Difference: If conservatives want to argue that Barack Obama's been flip-flopping on Iraq, I'll disagree but I could see what they mean. Charles Krauthammer, however, can't seriously believe that Obama's been "assiduously obliterat[ing] all differences with McCain on national security and social issues" since the end of the primaries.

Consider such non-obscure points as John McCain is pro-life and has said he wants to appoint judges who will restrict abortion rights, whereas Barack Obama is pro-choice. John McCain favors an amendment to California's constitution that would take back gay and lesbian couples' newfound marriage rights whereas Barack Obama opposes such an amendment. Barack Obama opposes a permanent American military presence in Iraq whereas John McCain favors it. Barack Obama thinks torture is wrong even when the CIA does it, whereas John McCain thinks it's great for the CIA to torture people. Barack Obama favors good-faith high-level negotiations with Iran, whereas John McCain wants to "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran." One could go on, but it hardly seems necessary -- the only question is why The Washington Post thinks it's a good idea to publish columns that are designed to mislead its audience rather than to inform its audience, or why they think customers would want to pay money for a publication that behaves that way.

Hilzoy Speaks Ill of the Living

2008-07-06T19:39:00.000-07:00

She speaks ill of all those conservatives who praise Jesse Helms, that is:

I haven't written anything about Jesse Helms' death, since I don't like speaking ill of the dead. However: every so often, conservatives wonder: why oh why do people think that the Republican party, and/or the conservative movement, is bigoted? I think that the conservative response to Helms' death ought to settle that debate once and for all.

More below the fold. Note that I have largely restricted myself to conservatives' own words (and not random bloggers, but people and magazines with some standing in conservative circles), and to Helms' words and actions.

For my part, I'll just echo Matt:

"Conservatives are taking a line that I might have regarded as an unfair smear just a week ago, and saying that Helms is a brilliant exemplar of the American conservative movement.

And if that's what the Heritage Foundation and National Review and the other key pillars of American conservatism want me to believe, then I'm happy to believe it. But it reflects just absolutely horribly on them and their movement that this is how they want to be seen -- as best exemplified by bigotry, lunatic notions about foreign policy, and tobacco subsidies."

And Ezra:

"Some of my conservative friends often complain about the difficulty of constructing a "usable history" out of the movement's recent past, and I sympathize with their plight. When leading exemplars of your political tradition were trying to preserve segregation less than four decades ago, it's a bit hard to argue that your party, which is now electorally based in the American South, is really rooted in a cautious empiricism and an acute concern for the deadweight losses associated with taxation. That project would really benefit, however, if more of them would step forward and say that Helms marred the history of their movement and left decent people ashamed to call themselves conservative. The attempt to subsume his primary political legacy beneath a lot of pabulum about "limited government and individual liberty" (which did not apparently include the liberty of blacks to work amongst whites or mingle with other races) is embarrassing. But if it goes unchallenged, what are those of us outside the conservative movement to think?"

Some conservative reactions:
George W. Bush:

"Throughout his long public career, Senator Jesse Helms was a tireless advocate for the people of North Carolina, a stalwart defender of limited government and free enterprise, a fearless defender of a culture of life, and an unwavering champion of those struggling for liberty. Under his leadership, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was a powerful force for freedom. And today, from Central America to Central Europe and beyond, people remember: in the dark days when the forces of tyranny seemed on the rise, Jesse Helms took their side.

Jesse Helms was a kind, decent, and humble man and a passionate defender of what he called "the Miracle of America." So it is fitting that this great patriot left us on the Fourth of July. He was once asked if he had any ambitions beyond the United States Senate. He replied: "The only thing I am running for is the Kingdom of Heaven." Today, Jesse Helms has finished the race, and we pray he finds comfort in the arms of the loving God he strove to serve throughout his life."

John McCain:

"At this time, let us remember a life dedicated to serving this nation."

Mitch McConnell:

"Today we lost a Senator whose stature in Congress had few equals. Senator Jesse Helms was a leading voice and courageous champion for the many causes he believed in."

Trent Lott:

"He was one of the giants of the '80s and '90s in the United States Senate"

Bob Dole:

“He was a conservative icon,” Bob Dole, the former senator and Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview on CNN. “He was a good, decent human being.”

The Corner:

"Death of a Conservative Great [Mark R. Levin]

I wish the Helms family peace, and I thank Jesse Helms for helping to ensure the election of Ronald Reagan, being a warrior against the Soviet Union and for the release of Soviet Jews and other abused minorities, and being a voice for millions of unborn babies.

I have noticed some of the smears lobbed at William Buckley in other places since his death; Jesse Helms is in for even more of it. Other prominent conservatives will face the same. Unfortunately, such is the nature of these things now."

The Weekly Standard reposted this article in response to Helms' death:

"Reagan, as candidate and president, was conservatism with a happy face. Helms is conservatism with a stiffened spine. Reagan's success as a conservative leader, however, wouldn't have happened without Helms's bracing him. The Republican party needs another duo like that. What's missing, obviously, is a new Reagan. Helms is still here, operating at full tilt."

The Heritage Foundation blog:

"Jesse Helms, U.S. Senator and Conservative Champion, Dies

Conservative Sen. Jesse Helms, 86, a truly great American and champion of freedom, died at 1:15 a.m. today. Helms, who gave our country three decades of service as a U.S. senator from North Carolina, was ill in recent years.

Heritage President Ed Feulner (pictured at right with Helms and his wife Dorothy) presented Helms in 2002 with the Clare Boothe Luce Award, Heritage’s highest honor, calling him a “dedicated, unflinching and articulate advocate of conservative policy and principle.”"

John Fund, WSJ:

"If Ronald Reagan was the sunny and optimistic face of modern conservatism, the uncompromisingly defiant exemplar of it was Jesse Helms, who died yesterday at age 86."

The American Conservative's blog cites, without comment, someone saying:

"On Capitol Hill, conservatives had no finer champion than Jesse Helms, the longtime Republican senator from North Carolina."

Commentary's blog reposts an old article (pdf), which says, among other things:

"Yet the "racism" of which Helms is accused turns out on inspection to consist of nothing more than an opposition to quotas and other forms of racial preferences."

Commentary's blogger adds:

"His controversial political career has been chronicled in numerous obituaries, but few recall the severity of the demonization to which Helms was subjected by many liberals–who accused him of being a one-man “pantheon of evil.”"

See below to judge Helms' racism, and whether he was just a "controversial figure" who was "demonized" by the left. The quotes below might also provide some useful background for judging this, from The Corner:

"The first sentence of the NYT obit:

Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina Senator whose courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Friday.

He "opposed civil rights"? Uh, no. He opposed a particular vision of them."

And, of course, RedState:

"He was a warrior and a patriot. The date of his death is fitting indeed."

***

Here are quotes by Jesse Helms himself. As you read them, bear in mind all those lovely quotes above, the ones about how he's a conservative champion, a fighter for conservative ideals, etc. They said it, not me. Like Matt Yglesias, I would have thought it was a completely unjust smear against conservatism to have said any such thing. [UPDATE: To be clear, what I would have thought was unfair was not to take him as a part of the conservative movement, but to think of him as an exemplary figure or a champion. END UPDATE.]

On respect for the President:

"Just days after Mr. Helms, a Republican from North Carolina, created a furor by saying that President Clinton was not up to the job of Commander in Chief, he told The News and Observer, a newspaper in Raleigh: "Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He'd better have a bodyguard.""

On race:

"From the beginning, Helms was schooled in the political device of using race to propel white conservatives to the polls. As news director for WRAL radio, Helms supported Willis Smith in his 1950 Senate campaign against Frank Porter Graham, the former president of the University of North Carolina. The campaign theme was that Graham favored interracial marriages. "White people, wake up before it is too late," said one ad. "Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races."

The campaign's further contribution to political notoriety was a handbill that showed Graham's wife dancing with a black man. (...)

But before long, Helms found his real calling as a nightly television commentator for WRAL in North Carolina, a post he held from 1960 to 1972. He blasted the "pinkos" and "Yankees" in Washington, and criticized King's inner circle of civil rights leaders for "proven records of communism, socialism and sex perversion." He railed against Social Security, calling it "nothing more than doles and handouts." (...)

In the 1972 race, pitted against a Democratic congressman from Durham, Helms used code words that enraged liberals. The congressman's name was Nick Galifianakis. Helms' slogan: "Elect Jesse Helms -- He's One of Us.""

And:

"Helms warned that, "Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced."

He suggested that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist dupe and refused, even decades after King's death, to honor the Nobel Peace Prize winner.

He dismissed the civil rights movement as a cabal of communists and "moral degenerates."

As the movement gathered strength -- and as murderous violence against activists in particular and African-Americans in general increased -- Helms menacingly suggested to non-violent civil rights activists that, "The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men's rights.""

A personal favorite, worth remembering when you read things about how courteous Helms was in person:

"When Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois became the first African-American woman to sit in the Senate, Helms followed Moseley-Braun into an elevator, announcing to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch: "Watch me make her cry. I'm going to make her cry. I'm going to sing 'Dixie' until she cries."

Then, emphasizing the lines about how "good" things were before the Civil War ended slavery, Helms sang "Dixie.""

And another:

"His disdain for people of color (exemplified by his "humorous" habit, in private, of referring to any black person as "Fred") continues to find ways of expressing itself. He is the Senate's most reliable opponent of any measure aimed at securing the rights or improving the conditions of African-Americans. In 1994, when Nelson Mandela visited the Capitol, Helms ostentatiously turned his back on him."

Humorous? Referring to any black person as "Fred"??

And (Helms himself, h/t Majikthise):

“No intelligent Negro citizen should be insulted by a reference to this very plain fact of life. It is time to face honestly and sincerely the purely scientific statistical evidence of natural racial distinction in group intellect. ... There is no bigotry either implicit or intended in such a realistic confrontation with the facts of life. ... Those who would undertake to solve the problem by merely spending more money, and by massive forced integration, may be doing the greatest injustice of all to the Negro.”

And:

"Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced."

And:

“To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn't have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing.”

And:

""Martin Luther King repeatedly refers to his 'non-violent movement.' It is about as non-violent as the Marines landing on Iwo Jima.""

And:

"I was a senior when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. Roughly 2,000 of us joined a vigil on the quad for several days. (...) Jesse Helms came on the television and said that all of the students sitting on the quad at Duke should ask their parents if it would be all right for their son or daughter to "marry a Negro" (Duke students were practically all white in those days). Unless the student's parents approved of that prospect, Helms advised, he or she should go back to class."

And:

"As a television commentator before running for the Senate, Helms said, "Dr. (Martin Luther) King's outfit ... is heavily laden at the top with leaders of proven records of communism, socialism and sex perversion, as well as other curious behavior." He called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress.""

Later, his views had not changed. (This is a transcription of a video; it doesn't say when the interview it shows is from, but I'd guess the late 80s or 90s, from his appearance. It's the video linked under Martin Luther King.)

"I thought it [the Civil Rights Act] was very unwise. It was taking liberties away from one group of citizens and giving them to another. I thought it was bad legislation then, and I have had nothing to change my mind about it."

Helms also "staged a filibuster against the establishment of a national holiday to mark the birthday of Martin Luther King, having called King a communist and a sex pervert", and "was one of a small number of senators who opposed extending the Voting Rights Act in 1982, eventually giving up a filibuster when then-Majority Leader Sen. Howard Baker, a Tennessee Republican, said the Senate would not take up any other business until it acted on the extension."

And:

"Appearing on “Larry King Live” in 1995, Jesse Helms, then the senior senator from North Carolina, fielded a call from an unusual admirer. Helms deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, the caller gushed, “for everything you’ve done to help keep down the niggers.” Given the rank ugliness of the sentiment — the guest host, Robert Novak, called it, with considerable understatement, “politically incorrect” — Helms could only pause before responding. But the hesitation couldn’t suppress his gut instincts. “Whoops, well, thank you, I think,” he said."

One of his home state papers sums it up:

"Helms was an unceasing foe of the 20th century's social movements -- the drives for equality by blacks, women and gays. While others saw groups striving for a piece of the American dream, Helms saw threats to the social fabric.

Along with former gubernatorial candidate I. Beverly Lake Sr., Helms was a leading voice for segregation in North Carolina. Unlike other well-known segregationists, such as Alabama Gov. George Wallace and Thurmond, Helms never repudiated his views or reached out to black voters.

He portrayed the civil rights movement as being planned in Moscow, dismissed Martin Luther King Jr. as a Marxist and a pervert, and called racial integration a phony issue."

On gays:

"He fought bitterly against federal financing for AIDS research and treatment, saying the disease resulted from “unnatural” and “disgusting” homosexual behavior.

“Nothing positive happened to Sodom and Gomorrah,” he said, “and nothing positive is likely to happen to America if our people succumb to the drumbeats of support for the homosexual lifestyle.”"

And:

"Helms practically invented the modern conservative politics of sexuality, along with the electoral mobilization of white conservative evangelicals, starting back in the 1970s. In 1977, he seized on Anita Bryant's successful campaign to overturn a gay rights ordinance in Miami and began building a national backlash against antidiscrimination laws. As early as 1979, he was making speeches about the terrible threat of "secular humanism" to Christianity, making the wonky Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies an unlikely villain. When the AIDS epidemic emerged in the 1980s, Helms began an extended and violently worded campaign to "protect" Americans from the "perverts" whose "disgusting" habits were responsible for AIDS, while attacking efforts to find effective treatments. (...)

But other aspects of Helms's personality cannot be ignored, particularly his venomous assault on Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy and his virulent hatred of gays and lesbians. For years, as part of his campaign against the NEA, this "courtly" Christian carried around portfolios of homoerotic Mapplethorpe photos and showed them to reporters and (male) citizens with the question, "How do you like them apples?" And as late as 1995, when an old friend wrote him to recommend compassion for people like her gay son, who had died of AIDS, Helms wrote back to say, "I wish he had not played Russian roulette with his sexual activities.""

And:

"1993: On the nomination of a gay rights activist to a federal post: “She’s not your garden-variety lesbian. She’s a militant-activist-mean lesbian, working her whole career to advance the homosexual agenda. Now you think I’m going to sit still and let her be confirmed by the Senate? … If you want to call me a bigot, go ahead.”"

And:

"As a senator, he explained that he voted against Roberta Achtenberg, President Clinton's nominee for a Housing and Urban Development position, "because she's a damn lesbian." When Helms encountered protesters during a visit to Mexico in 1986, he remarked: "All Latins are volatile people. Hence, I was not surprised at the volatile reaction." In 1990, Helms stayed away in protest when Nelson Mandela addressed a joint session of Congress."

And:

"The Bible is unmistakably instructive on the sin of sodomy," he declared in 1994. "I confess I regard it as an abomination." Aids, he suggested, was acquired through "deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct" and he became an ardent opponent of government funding for Aids research and education. In 1987 he described Aids prevention literature as "so obscene, so revolting, I may throw up."

In his own words:

"The government should spend less money on people with AIDS because they got sick as a result of deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct."

And:

"Over the years Helms has declared homosexuality "degenerate," and homosexuals "weak, morally sick wretches." (Newsweek, 12/5/94) In a tirade highlighting his routine opposition to AIDS research funding, Helms lashed out at the Kennedy-Hatch AIDS bill in 1988: "There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy." (States News Service, 5/17/88)"

(Take that, Ryan White!)

On foreign affairs, he was an almost wholly malign force:

"His obstinacy in foreign policy, where pragmatism often guides debate, was remarkable. Few administrations escaped his wrath. He condemned President Nixon's historic 1972 trip to Beijing as "appeasing Red China." He castigated President Carter, saying he "gave away the Panama Canal." And after the newly elected President Clinton proposed that gays be allowed to serve openly in the military, Helms said that Clinton "better have a bodyguard" if he visited North Carolina. (...)

Because of Helms, several major treaties never became law: The Kyoto Protocol against global warming, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the proposed land mine treaty -- all were stopped at his insistence."

He also had a thing about governments with death squads, and the appallingly brutal South African-funded guerilla groups in Angola and Mozambique. He supported the apartheid regime in South Africa.

***

And here's a random quote from 1966 (cited in the Boston Globe, 11/21/1994), just because I like it:

"The nation has been hypnotized by the swaying and the gesturing of the Watusi and the Frug."

The Abyss Has Drilled Fracking Laser Holes in Our Skulls with Its Stare...

2008-07-02T11:10:00.001-07:00

Gary Farber:

We've always known that our current torture regime came from back-engineering the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) training given some U.S. military personnel intended to enable them to resist the horrible tortures used by the KGB, Chinese Communists, and other historical enemies of the U.S. whose morality we condemned for their willingness to engage in torture. That's old news. Now we have documentation of exactly whom we've copied: yes, the Chinese Communists. Isn't that lovely? Scott Shane reports:

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency....

The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities....

Mr. Biderman’s 1957 article described “one form of torture” used by the Chinese as forcing American prisoners to stand “for exceedingly long periods,” sometimes in conditions of “extreme cold.” Such passive methods, he wrote, were more common than outright physical violence. Prolonged standing and exposure to cold have both been used by American military and C.I.A. interrogators against terrorist suspects. The chart also listed other techniques used by the Chinese, including “Semi-Starvation,” “Exploitation of Wounds,” and “Filthy, Infested Surroundings,” and with their effects: “Makes Victim Dependent on Interrogator,” “Weakens Mental and Physical Ability to Resist,” and “Reduces Prisoner to ‘Animal Level’ Concerns.”

The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance”...

How evil have we become?

The abyss has drilled fracking laser holes through us with its stare.

Remind me why we were the good guys in the Cold War, and WWII, again? The guys who wrote the Nuremberg Principles?

Please tell me; I really could use a reminder now.

And I'd like to know how we can regard ourselves as the same people any more. I'd really, really, like to know.

Marty Lederman Gets Shrill on John Yoo

2008-06-26T15:01:00.001-07:00

Marty Lederman on John Yoo:

Balkinization: John Yoo Testimony: Here are John Yoo's prepared remarks for the hearing before the House Judiciary Committee this morning. (I don't believe David Addington is submitting a prepared statement.) CSPAN covering it live here. I'm out of town and don't have time just now to blog in detail about this statement, except for a handful of very quick reactions:

John claims that the 2004 Levin torture memo, which superseded his 2002 OLC opinion, concluded that all interrogation methods OLC had previously approved as legal "were still legal." We now know that that's dead wrong. As Levin testified before this same committee last week, the footnote in question, which Attorney General Gonzales insisted that OLC include, merely indicated that the writers of the 2002 memos -- i.e., John Yoo -- would not have changed their bottom line, even if they had employed Levin's analysis. Levin himself, however, was uncertain about the legality of some of the CIA techniques, and was in the process of reviewing them when he was effectively removed from OLC.

John is testifying that his torture memos could have had no bearing on the abuse that took place in Iraq, because "the Geneva Conventions provided the relevant rules for the war in Iraq." There are several problems with this statement. Most important is that OLC itself, when John was there, had advised the Pentagon that the Fourth Geneva Convention did not protect "unlawful combatants," which includes most if not all of the insurgents in Iraq. (See page 4 of the April 2003 DOD Working Group Report.) As Jack Goldsmith reports in his book, the very first thing he decided when he arrived at OLC in October 2003 was that the Fourth Geneva Convention did protect Iraqi civilians -- a decision that hocked and dismayed the White House. It is fairly clear (as reflected in the Working Group Report) that until that time, the Administration, based presumably on John's own advice, was acting on the assumption that the insurgents in Iraq were not protected by the Geneva Conventions. This explains why, according to several reports (most importantly those of Sy Hersh and Jane Mayer), the Pentagon and CIA placed Special Forces and CIA operatives in Iraq in 2001 or 2002, whose basic instructions were that there was no law -- certainly not Geneva -- that protected detainees, and that the "gloves were off" and that they could engage in widespread, wanton abuse and cruelty. Which they did. (And as the Fay, Jones and Schlesinger Reports found, and many accounts attest, the conspicuous abuse by CIA and Special Forces in Iraq was an important contributing factor to the breakdown of ordinary norms among the regular military forces, as well.) The Pentagon and CIA would not have given these forces the green light to abuse prisoners if OLC had not previously advised that neither the Geneva Conventions nor any relevant statutes stood in the way of such abuse. Finally, John's broad Commander-in-Chief override theory, which was a prominent part of the DOD Working Group Report, and which was briefed to General Miller on his way to "GTMOize" Iraq, obviously conveyed the message that the President could ignore any applicable statutes and treaties, even if they would otherwise apply. John's legal advice, then, was a fairly direct cause -- certainly a necessary cause -- of the abuse in Iraq in 2002 and 2003.

John stresses, as he has in the past, that he was without much guidance in interpreting the federal torture statute, since there had not been any prosecutions under it, or any court cases construing it. But the virtually identical definition of "torture" is included in statutes governing removal of aliens and asylum applications, and that definition had received extensive treatment from courts under those statutes (which were also enacted in order to implement the Convention Against Torture). The INS and the State Department, therefore, had very extensive knowledge and expertise on the question. And yet those experts were cut out of the loop -- they were not consulted on the OLC opinion. Indeed, John's testimony states that the NSC ordered OLC not to discuss its work with the State Department! -- something that is in itself fairly scandalous.

John states that his 2002 torture opinion was "reviewed, edited and re-written by the assistant attorney general in charge of the office at the time [Jay Bybee], as is the case with all opinions that issue from OLC." John is correct that virtually all written OLC opinions -- certainly those of great importance or dispute -- are at the very least reviewed by the AAG. How, then, does he explain the fact that two of the most momentous OLC opinions has ever issued -- the September 25, 2001 Opinion on the President's war powers and the March 14, 2003 opinion informing DOD (over the vociferous objections of numerous DOD lawyers) that its interrogators had virtual carte blanche to ignore federal statutes -- were signed by John Yoo himself (a mere deputy), rather than by the head of OLC (Dan Koffsky in 2001; Jay Bybee in 2003)?

Posted 8:42 AM by Marty Lederman [link]

Joe Klein Is Shrill!!

2008-06-25T20:33:00.001-07:00

In the immortal words of Keanu Reeves: "Whoa!!"

Joe Klein:

Surge Protection - Swampland - TIME: The notion that we could just waltz in and inject democracy into an extremely complicated, devout and ancient culture smacked--still smacks--of neocolonialist legerdemain. The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives--people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary--plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel. And then there is the question--made manifest by the no-bid contracts offered U.S. oil companies by the Iraqis--of two oil executives, Bush and Cheney, securing a new source of business for their Texas buddies...

I really don't think it works that way. It's not that loyalties are in any sense "divided." Instead, it's an inability to even think of the idea that (interest of Likud) ≠ (interest of Israel) ≠ (interest of United States) or the idea that (interest of Texas oil barons) ≠ (interest of United States of America)...

And Andrew Sullivan is shrill too:

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan: Max Boot is admirably candid. He helps us realize that this election is indeed at root a decision on whether to keep troops in Iraq for the next century or more:

In order to build on the success that General Petraeus and his soldiers have had, we need to maintain a long-term commitment in Iraq - for 100 years if need be, as John McCain has said. That doesn’t mean 100 years of fighting; clearly, that would be unsustainable. It does mean a long-term troop presence designed to reassure Iraqis of our commitment to their security against an array of enemies.

Their security? Heh. In fifty years' time, the Iraqis will not be able to defend themselves against Iran? Or Syria? Please. If they've managed this much progress in the last year, we could be almost out of there in the next president's term of office. Even under Saddam, the Iraqis weren't defeated by the Iranian mullahs. Notice also how a few months of relative calm are instantly deployed to justify a century of occupation. Can you imagine what the next platform for invasion will be? And on what planet does Boot live to think that permanent US troops in the heart of the Muslim Middle East will not require endless, endless fighting?

This obviously isn't about Iraq, as we are fast discovering. It's about an ever greater American entanglement in the Middle East in part to secure oil supplies we need to wean ourselves off and in part a foolish attempt to protect Israel. And Joe Klein is in no way engaging in anti-Semitism - please - by pointing out the increasingly obvious fact that the Iraq war was in part launched to assist Israel (even though many Israelis were against it):

You want evidence of divided loyalties? How about the "benign domino theory" that so many Jewish neoconservatives talked to me about--off the record, of course--in the runup to the Iraq war, the idea that Israel's security could be won by taking out Saddam, which would set off a cascade of disaster for Israel's enemies in the region? As my grandmother would say, feh! Do you actually deny that the casus belli that dare not speak its name wasn't, as I wrote in February 2003, a desire to make the world safe for Israel?

Joe Klein Is Shrill!!

2008-06-25T19:17:00.001-07:00

In the immortal words of Keanu Reeves: "Whoa!!"

Joe Klein:

Surge Protection - Swampland - TIME: The notion that we could just waltz in and inject democracy into an extremely complicated, devout and ancient culture smacked--still smacks--of neocolonialist legerdemain. The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives--people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary--plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel. And then there is the question--made manifest by the no-bid contracts offered U.S. oil companies by the Iraqis--of two oil executives, Bush and Cheney, securing a new source of business for their Texas buddies...

And Andrew Sullivan is shrill too:

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan: Max Boot is admirably candid. He helps us realize that this election is indeed at root a decision on whether to keep troops in Iraq for the next century or more:

In order to build on the success that General Petraeus and his soldiers have had, we need to maintain a long-term commitment in Iraq - for 100 years if need be, as John McCain has said. That doesn’t mean 100 years of fighting; clearly, that would be unsustainable. It does mean a long-term troop presence designed to reassure Iraqis of our commitment to their security against an array of enemies.

Their security? Heh. In fifty years' time, the Iraqis will not be able to defend themselves against Iran? Or Syria? Please. If they've managed this much progress in the last year, we could be almost out of there in the next president's term of office. Even under Saddam, the Iraqis weren't defeated by the Iranian mullahs. Notice also how a few months of relative calm are instantly deployed to justify a century of occupation. Can you imagine what the next platform for invasion will be? And on what planet does Boot live to think that permanent US troops in the heart of the Muslim Middle East will not require endless, endless fighting?

This obviously isn't about Iraq, as we are fast discovering. It's about an ever greater American entanglement in the Middle East in part to secure oil supplies we need to wean ourselves off and in part a foolish attempt to protect Israel. And Joe Klein is in no way engaging in anti-Semitism - please - by pointing out the increasingly obvious fact that the Iraq war was in part launched to assist Israel (even though many Israelis were against it):

You want evidence of divided loyalties? How about the "benign domino theory" that so many Jewish neoconservatives talked to me about--off the record, of course--in the runup to the Iraq war, the idea that Israel's security could be won by taking out Saddam, which would set off a cascade of disaster for Israel's enemies in the region? As my grandmother would say, feh! Do you actually deny that the casus belli that dare not speak its name wasn't, as I wrote in February 2003, a desire to make the world safe for Israel?

Stupidest Man Alive: Patrick J. Buchanan

2008-06-22T11:39:00.001-07:00

Donald Luskin cannot match this, from Pat Buchanan:

Was the Holocaust Inevitable?: In every crisis the Kaiser [Wilhelm II] blundered into, including his foolish [July 1914] "blank cheque" to Austria after Serb assassins murdered the heir to the Austrian throne, the Kaiser backed down or was trying to back away when war erupted...

World War I "erupted" on August 4, 1914 when five German armies crossed the Belgian border. That's some "backing away"...

And nobody can match this, from Pat Buchanan:

[Hitler] sought an alliance, or at least friendship, with Great Britain and knew any move on France would mean war with Britain -- a war he never wanted.... That Hitler was a rabid anti-Semite is undeniable.... But for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust. Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table. That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America, and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll...

Is Buchanan really saying: "If only the British had let Hitler win!"?

Jim Henley: Why the Republican Party Must Be Destroyed

2008-06-22T08:59:00.001-07:00

Jim Henley provides the best argument I have seen on why the Republican Party must, for the good of the nation and the world, be destroyed immediately:

The Art of the Possible » Blog Archive » A (Public) Choice, Not an Echo: No matter who wins the election, so-called neoconservatives will probably remain the prime movers of Republican foreign policy for the foreseeable future.

They are the energized constituency within the Party. They care more about foreign policy than any other component except a slice of the paleos.

Neoconservatives have prominent media platforms that are useful to the GOP as a whole.

Neoconservatism is useful to important elements of the GOP coalition. It implies spiraling increases to military spending. It is a coherent nationalism for the nationalist party to embrace. It provides a ready-made critique of the domestic political opposition (”appeasers!”).

The “stab-in-the-back” narrative is a perfect example of the kind of magical thinking that explains away failure. The rituals didn’t fail us, we failed the rituals! This has worked for thousands of years. As sure as shooting, bad things will happen around the globe during an Obama administration. An Obama administration may even - gasp! - err in response to a crisis. The beauty of neoconservative ideology is that there is always some war that could, theoretically, have been launched at some point that didn’t get fought, and it will always be possible to claim that “if only” America had had the “will and imagination” to kill just those extra few foreigners, everything would have turned out different and better.

Neoconservatives play well with others. Neoconservatives have been willing to accede to or even advocate the fiscal goals of the rent-seeking element of the GOP and the social goals of the evangelicals. >6. It’s important to remember that first-generation neoconservatism was conservatism: the neocons shared the extant right-wing concerns about crime; the relationship of dependency to the welfare state; “bending over backwards” to ameliorate racism; changing family patterns. For every PJ O’Rourke-style Republican Party Reptile who merely wanted to cut taxes and “Give War a Chance,” there was a Norman Podhoretz or Daniel Patrick Moynihan concerned that “the blacks” were literally on their way to becoming a separate species.

Evangelicals and paleocons are not an identity. The nationalist self-satisfaction of neoconservatism - American hegemony is morally good - fits mainstream evangelicalism’s view of (Judeo-)Christian America as anointed by God. (And, of course, at war with Islam.) 8, Paleoconservatism does not play well with others. Its foreign policy does not lead to high defense budgets. Its immigration policy does not maximize cheap labor. Its preference for localism can foster hostility to agribusiness and large retailers. It will continue to be at a disadvantage in intra-party disputes on practically any topic, including foreign affairs, war and internal security prerogatives.

Simply put, outside of anti-Semitic fantasies, small groups of mostly Jewish intellectuals don’t bamboozle large Gentile institutions - and the Republican Party is nothing if not a large Gentile institution - into betraying their own perceived best interests. So-called neoconservatism became, by mid-decade, simply Republican foreign policy. The base assumptions of the GOP base and elite just are neoconservative. And that happened because the ideology of neoconservatism served Republican-Party interests and accorded with preexisting Republican-Party proclivities.

The question is whether one possible electoral defeat this year changes those interests significantly. My inclination is, no. Every country is going to have a nationalist party. This particular country’s nationalist party is still going to want to justify massive defense budgets, flatter the nation about its righteousness and paint its opponents as “on the other side.” Paleo-ism cuts against too many of those interests. The so-called Realists don’t inspire passion. Too many other rationales for an American nationalist party - from immigration to homophobia - are demographically doomed. So-called Neoconservatism is much more of a unifying factor than a source of division for the GOP and likely to remain so.

Spencer Ackerman Looks at the Bushies

2008-06-21T20:30:00.001-07:00

He writes, and he is shrill:

History Through a Bush Lens: If your legacy consisted of two draining wars, close to 5,000 U.S. fatalities, the spread of anti-Americanism around the globe, the alienation of traditional allies and general discredit, you might attempt revisionist history yourself.

Over the last few weeks, prominent members of President George W. Bush's foreign-policy team -- some speaking for themselves, others speaking to leading journalists -- have sought a reconsideration of the administration's reputation. At stake is whether history will record something valuable out of a foreign policy now considered something of a disaster, even by many on the right.

Contending that the administration has left a record worth building on, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.... Robert D. Kaplan [fluffing for] much-maligned Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in a less-negative light than has been typical. Meanwhile, President George W. Bush's fare-thee-well tour of Europe last week seemed designed to ask: Was it really so bad?

Some diplomatic historians and former Army officers answer: Yes, it really was.

Lloyd C. Gardner.... "Even after several years," said Gardner, "it remains hard to understand how such an ahistorical judgment [as the Iraq war] convinced policy-makers they were right." A retired Army officer compared Rumsfeld's style of dealing with the Army to a child torturing small animals.

Rice's article tacitly affirms Gardner's point. Her Foreign Affairs article tours the global horizon as the sun sets on the Bush administration. She elides Iraq and Afghanistan, preferring to focus on great-power management. Befitting Rice's background as a Soviet expert, she argues early in her piece that Russia poses little threat to the international order. China, India and Brazil all should be cheered into the family of great powers.

"And as these emerging powers change the geopolitical landscape," she writes, "it will be important that international institutions also change to reflect this reality. This is why President Bush has made clear his support for a reasonable expansion of the U.N. Security Council." Yet few will think of "expansion of the U.N. Security Council" when they think of the Bush administration's foreign policy. In any event, the council has the same five members it did in January 2001.

She becomes incoherent when describing the virtues of democracy. "Democratic development is a unified political-economic model, and it offers the mix of flexibility and stability that best enables states to seize globalization's opportunities and manage its challenges," Rice argues. "And for those who think otherwise: What real alternative worthy of America is there?" Those who "think otherwise" include Rice, in her almost fawning descriptions of authoritarian Russia and China. Were Rice consistent, she would be arguing for aggressive U.S. democratization efforts in both great powers. The fact that she doesn't leads to the cynical interpretation that democracy is only a ruse for the Bush administration to confront its weaker adversaries.

Similar problems arise when Rice finally deals with the Muslim world. Arguing on behalf of the Bush Doctrine of democracy imposed abroad through military force, she essentially claims that alternative courses of action fail to address the real roots of terrorism. In the past, "we supported authoritarian regimes, and they supported our shared interest in regional stability," she writes. "After Sept. 11, it became increasingly clear that this old bargain had produced false stability."

Yet the administration still supports authoritarian Mideast regimes, like those in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco and the Gulf states that offer the U.S. discounted oil and military bases. Rice does not deal with the alternative contention that the feeding trough for Mideast radicalism and instability might have something to do with the Arab sense of outrage over the U.S. occupation of Iraq or the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Rice's discussion of Iraq comes late in the article. She defends the invasion, and stretches the truth to do so. "The Iraq Survey Group showed [that] Saddam was ready and willing to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction programs as soon as international pressure had dissipated," Rice writes. In fact, the Iraq Survey Group also showed that Iraq's WMD programs were in a pitiful state of disrepair, meaning that Rice is neglecting the actual question of what Saddam Hussein could have done with the chimerical one of what he wanted to do. Ultimately, Rice punts on the Iraq war: "This story is still being written, and will be for many years to come." (Interestingly, the word "Afghanistan" appears only three times.)

In response, Michael Hirsch of Newsweek observed, "If she's not sure that things are better, why should the rest of us be?"

Rice's elevation of peripheral aspects of Bush's foreign policy to a place of centrality underscore the administration's mistakes, Gardner said. "Bush certainly was not unique among either American or world leaders in miscalculating the fruits of war," Gardner said, contending that Bush's mistakes come from a broader, technology-stoked perception of American omnipotence. "Americans, however, have been seduced for a long time by the supposed charms of technology."

If Rice's essay is evasive, so is Kaplan's defense of Rumsfeld in The Atlantic. The two pieces contain a similar element: both portray peripheral policy choices as the criteria by which the administration should be judged.

"Thanks to his long tenure and personal dynamism," Kaplan writes, "Rumsfeld has had an impact that will go far beyond Iraq in shaping the actions of future administrations. Obsessed with what could go wrong, Rumsfeld was a brilliant worrier. It is in his... pessimism where we might find some saving graces to his legacy."

Those saving graces, Kaplan writes, are the former defense secretary's fears that terrorist groups can't be deterred from using weapons of mass destruction, and that Gen. Colin L. Powell's doctrine of using overwhelming military force -- or none at all -- in response to aggression was an outdated relic of the Cold War. "Rumsfeld worried that the world was too messy, too fluid—with one crisis flowing into the next across geographical regions—and the dangers facing America too complex and varied for such a cut-and-dried approach," Kaplan writes.

Such an approach led Rumsfeld to embrace preventive war, and to wage it using smaller ground-force components than Army officials thought prudent, supplementing their use with on-battlefield information technology for greater surveillance, reconnaissance and intelligence work. His theory -- which he called "transformation" -- was that getting soldiers "networked" to each other was more important than having many of them.

But Kaplan's revisionism whitewashes the actual policy choices Rumsfeld adopted. For a defense secretary allegedly eager to transcend Cold War paradigms, Rumsfeld's theological commitment to the decades-old right-wing dream of a ballistic missile defense system is, at least, puzzling.

At the same time, his tech-heavy "transformation" project intended to replace the Powell Doctrine, even Kaplan has to admit, failed its most important tests. "[B]y violating aspects of the Powell doctrine in Iraq," he writes, "Rumsfeld and his subordinates arguably showed themselves to be precisely the stupid civilians the doctrine was meant to guard against."

Army soldiers, and particularly veterans of the wars, aren't as eager as Kaplan to turn the page on Rumsfeld. "There's an argument out there contending Donald Rumsfeld wasn't a complete disaster as a secretary of defense if for no other reason than he helped re-establish strong civilian control over the military -- a prerequisite for any kind of transformation agenda," said Andrew Exum, an Army veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan. "After all, the argument goes, the generals aren't going to reform themselves. This argument, I feel, isn't as persuasive now that we have seen the effect of Secretary [Robert] Gates, who has managed to both be firm with the generals while at the same time earning their respect -- and the respect of the Congress -- with his quiet competence and less confrontational demeanor."

One retired Army officer who saw Iraq planning up close also finds these recent efforts to whitewash Rumsfeld unpersuasive. He saw how Rumsfeld considered testing his pet theories more important than meticulous planning. "Detailed war planning for Iraq began in the fall of 2002," this officer, who requested anonymity, remembered. "I asked a fellow planner, one very late night in Kuwait, 'Dude, why are we doing this?' His response [was] 'I have no fucking idea.' He was the lead planner for the ground war."

But Rumsfeld had little patience with what he considered quotidian concerns. This ex-officer recalled briefing Rumsfeld as being an aggravating experience. "He took perverse joy in humiliating officers, usually majors-colonel level. We always called it 'kicking puppies,'" the officer said. "Officers had to appear in full dress uniform, and usually stood at attention while doing a 'desk side' brief to [Rumsfeld]. Rummy would wear a sweater -- think of a warped Mr. Rogers -- put his feet on the desk, and start flipping through slides. Some poor guy, who put two years of his life into whatever he was pitching, would be told things like 'this isn't very detailed.' Well, no, Mr. Dumbass. what you are reading is a 10-slide synopsis of a 400-page operations plan."

Not every member of the defense establishment agrees. One former civilian Pentagon analyst viewed Rumsfeld more favorably, and unlike Kaplan, defended Rumsfeld and the administration on the decision to invade Iraq. "The fact of the matter is that the Bush administration agreed on the need to topple Saddam without agreeing on precisely why they needed to do that," said the analyst, who also requested anonymity. "If the intel had been more inconclusive and fragmentary and ambivalent, you would have lost [then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard] Armitage and Powell maybe, but not me or [Undersecretary of Defense Douglas] Feith or Rumsfeld.

"For me," the analyst continued, "it was the uncertainty and lack of transparency that constituted the threat [from Saddam] all along -- so the intel on stockpiles was irrelevant to me -- but of course, we might not have been able to generate the necessary political support for the action on that basis. And certainly not without laying down a lot of groundwork first." Bush's own attempt at making nice with history was evident last week in Europe. In a valedictory interview with the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times of London, Bush regretted using bellicose language early in his administration and said it led to the U.S.-European divisions that plagued his first term. Telling Iraqi insurgents about to attack U.S. troops to "bring them on," he said, "indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace."

What he didn't say -- and neither do his subordinates -- was that the Europeans' impression might have had less to do with his language than with his unprovoked invasion of another country. That invasion, more than anything else, will be the administration's legacy.

And that invasion may have hastened American decline. "Bush is the worst" president in recent history, Gardner said, "only because he is caught at the end of the empire -- and will forever be associated with it."

Ben on the Asteroid Menace of Gregg Easterbrook (June 16, 2008) - The Asteroid Menace (Domestic Policy)

2008-06-18T16:57:00.001-07:00

He puts his finger on the big problem: it's not that Easterbrook is simply wrong all the time--then you could simply reverse the polarity:

Matthew Yglesias: The Asteroid Menace: Parts of this article approach a reasonable treatment of the subject and parts are Easterbrookian breathlessness. For example, there's a sentence about how if the Oort Cloud exists, it would multiply the number of (scary, dangerous) comets by some large number. That's not right. We infer that the Oort Cloud of comets is out there because the comets we see have to come from somewhere. We already have a good idea of how many comets are perturbed in to the inner solar system per year, because comets are easier to detect than small asteroids.

Another example is in the odds per century of a Tunguska-type airburst. Well, yes, they are probably common (perhaps one every century or few) but over the vast majority of the earth's area, a Tunguska-size airburst will harm few or no people.

That said, the general idea that a comprehensive survey of near-Earth objects is important is correct. It's also relatively inexpensive and inoffensive, as it requires telescopes, detectors, and software, but nothing offensive, no launch vehicles, no nukes.... As far as I know, the Air Force is funding Pan-STARRS officially to track NEOs and unofficially to track satellites. It's not a big mystery or hidden agenda. Well, the satellite part is a little hidden (I certainly don't know for sure, and if I did, I couldn't post about it)...

The Stages of Recovery from the Bush Presidency

2008-05-21T17:47:00.001-07:00

First there is disbelief:

We elected this guy as president? No way!

Then there is denial:

I won't watch him on TV, listen to him on the radio, I won't say his name, and so on (some of us kept this up for years).

Next, anger:

The birth of Shrillblog. Impeach!

Anger is followed by acceptance:

Shrillblog goes quiet.

Acceptance brings hope:

The election can't get here soon enough. Maybe, just maybe, things will change. It looks like the Democrats will win! Yeah!

But hope gives way to fear:

What if the Republicans use their dirty tricks to win again? Oh no, it looks like they might! Shrillblog has a flicker of new life.

Fear is followed by determination:

I won't let them win. I'll donate money, volunteer time, do whatever it takes to make sure the dirty tricks won't work this time.

And finally, resolution:

We did it! We won! It's over!

Or, horror of horrors, back to step one and disbelief:

I can't believe the Republicans won. I just don't understand how that happened. I am so depressed.

The Poor Man on the John Yoo Situation

2008-05-10T18:40:00.001-07:00

Characteristically Restrained:

They write letters « The Poor Man Institute: [It is a] matter of little consequence to the average American: whether Prof. Yoo picks up his paycheck from Berkeley or Liberty University, or whatever Home for Temporarily Inconvenienced Wingnuts would happily scoop him up. But probably a matter of consequence to the [Berkeley] administration, who - unless they want to rebrand their university as Liberty West Coast Satellite Campus - might not want their most recognizable faculty member having as his primary field of expertise “concocting legal sophistries to undermine the foundational values of western civilization.” Perhaps also of concern to alumni, who might feel less inclined to cut large checks to their alma mater if their Golden Bears sweatshirts started inviting questions about whether they played home games at Abu Ghraib (football fans can be very cruel).

The student body might have an interest in this matter, as would, I imagine, faculty and staff at other UC campuses, and even the taxpayers of California, who might wonder if they wanted to be so openly associated with a person who scuttled around the dark corners of an administration... asserting, for example, that the President had the right to crush the testicles of children in order to compel or punish their parents. So it could matter to more people than you might think whether Prof. Yoo gets to practice his craft in decent society, or whether he has to join the other crackpots and undesirables in the shadow reality of wingnut academia, where Jesus rides a dinosaur and the Moonies pick up the tab and the vast liberal fascist secularist conspiracy doesn’t give a f--- what utter bullshit you get up to so long as you stay down in your f------ hole. The thing about the Universe is that it likes to align itself harmoniously. I suspect there’s a way of putting things in order here.

Matthew Yglesias Is Shrill!

2008-05-10T18:37:00.001-07:00

He writes:

Matthew Yglesias (April 22, 2008) - The Blind Praising the Blind (Media): I continue to wonder what the point is of exercises like having Adam Nagourney or the team of John Harris and Jim Vandehei defend the ABC News debate. What the debate's critics are saying, after all, is that ABC's conduct was the apotheosis of everything that's wrong with MSM campaign coverage. To point out in response that the people most responsible for the MSM campaign coverage status quo thought it was good seems totally non-responsive.

What I'd like to see in defense of ABC would be to identify some likely Democratic Party primary voters in Pennsylvania or some other upcoming state who are now better-informed about the election than they were previously. Until that happens, though, I'm going to stick with James Fallows' observation that ordinary citizens show an extremely low level of interest in this sort of stuff. The fact that the people who've turned political reporting into appalling farce found the somewhat more appalling than usual farce of last week's debate even more delectable than the merely appalling debate work we'd seen earlier from Tim Russert and others is no kind of defense at all.

Felix Salmon's Ben Stein Watch: April 27, 2008

2008-05-10T18:07:00.001-07:00

Boy is Felix shrill:

Ben Stein Watch: April 27, 2008 - Finance Blog - Felix Salmon - Market Movers - Portfolio.com: Stein is maybe a little bit chastened, since he seems to have given up on trying to impart his own ideas in his column. Instead, he gives himself a reading-comprehension test, taking a widely-circulated speech by David Einhorn and trying to boil it down to its most salient points.

Naturally, Stein fails the test.

Einhorn's speech is worth reading, but Stein's self-described "CliffsNotes version of it" isn't. For instance, Einhorn makes the point that since employee compensation is a function of revenues, investment-bank employees are incentivized to maximize those revenues by adding leverage:

The managements of the investment banks did exactly what they were incentivized to do: maximize employee compensation. Investment banks pay out 50% of revenues as compensation. So, more leverage means more revenues, which means more compensation.

Clear and simple, right? Here's the SteinNotes version:

The fellows who run big investment banks have a strong incentive to maximize their assets and leverage themselves into deep trouble because their pay is a function of how much debt they can pile on. If they can use relatively low-interest debt to generate slightly higher returns, the firm earns more revenue and executive pay increases. Often, an astonishing 50 percent of total revenue goes to employee compensation at Wall Street firms.

Longer, more convoluted, and - in the last sentence - utterly missing the point.

There's nothing "astonishing" about the 50% figure, in an industry which relies on human capital. Stein calls himself a lawyer, so he probably knows that the employee-compensation-to-revenue ratio at law firms is closer to 100%. And in any case, the 50% figure is well known to anybody who follows the investment banking industry, and long predates the credit crunch. That Stein is astonished by it only goes to show how ill-qualified he is to write about this stuff.

Stein also has no idea what "capital" is in the banking industry. Banks 'can hold some scary "assets",' he says, making sure to put the word "assets" in scare quotes just to reinforce just how scary it is. He then continues:

What do they hold as capital against such risks? You would think it would be cash or Treasury bonds, wouldn't you? But no...

The S.E.C. -- acting as one of Wall Street's chief regulators, mind you -- also allowed such things as "hybrid capital instruments" (much riskier than cash or Treasuries), subordinated debt (ditto) and even deferred return of taxes, to be counted as capital.

Once again, Stein has managed to mangle one of Einhorn's points. Here's Einhorn's clear English:

Only tangible equity, not subordinated debt should count as capital.

How Stein managed to read that bit about "tangible equity" and decide that it referred to "cash or Treasury bonds" is beyond me. Stein is clearly too dim to realise that cash and Treasuries are assets, which means that they can hardly be used as capital to hold against assets. The point about cash and Treasuries, of course, is entirely Stein's, it's never made by Einhorn.

But Stein isn't really trying to channel Einhorn, he's just using Einhorn as an excuse to bash the same old drum all over again. This is 100% Stein, for instance, and appears nowhere in Einhorn's speech:

Henry M. Paulson Jr., the Treasury secretary, is calling for merging the S.E.C. with the easygoing Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in the financial equivalent of setting off a Doomsday Device.

A Doomsday Device? It would be great if Stein could tone down his language just a tiny bit, because while merging the SEC with the CFTC may or may not be a good idea, I don't think anybody (except perhaps for Stein) considers it to be tantamount to the End of the World. But then again, as the NYT itself pointed out, Stein is something of a master when it comes to such cheap rhetorical devices:

Blithely ignoring the vital distinction between social and scientific Darwinism, the film links evolution theory to fascism (as well as abortion, euthanasia and eugenics), shamelessly invoking the Holocaust with black-and-white film of Nazi gas chambers and mass graves.

No doubt Stein would do the same to Hank Paulson if he were allowed to incorporate B-roll into his columns. Let's just be thankful the NYT's multimedia push hasn't gone that far.

Paul Krugman Tells Us to Go Read Joe Klein from 2005

2008-05-10T18:03:00.001-07:00

Here's Klein. The occasion is that he recycled the title of his column. The Democrats, you see, are always shrinking:

The Incredible Shrinking Democrats: There was a cheap metaphor to be had in the remarkable moment when Safia al-Souhail, who had just voted in the Iraqi elections, and Janet Norwood, whose U.S. Marine son was killed in Iraq, embraced during the President's State of the Union speech last week.... [N]othing should detract from the emotional truth of the moment, the magnitude of Norwood's loss, the exhilaration of al-Souhail's ballot. Yes, disentanglement will be difficult. And, yes, we shouldn't "overhype" the election, as John Kerry clumsily suggested. But this is not a moment for caveats. It is a moment for solemn appreciation of the Iraqi achievement--however it may turn out--and for hope.

The Democrats are having trouble with graciousness these days....

This was a symptom of a larger disease: most Democrats seemed as reluctant as Kerry to express the slightest hint of optimism about the [Iraqi] elections. Congressional leaders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi diminished themselves....

Reid's claim that George W. Bush would reduce Social Security benefits 40% was hogwash. The President has merely stated the obvious, that reductions will be necessary. Reid also made the absurd comparison between Bush's very conservative investment-account proposal and Las Vegas gaming tables. Finally, there was the boorish and possibly unprecedented hooting of the President....

The day after the President's speech, the party's congressional leaders gathered at the Franklin D. Roosevelt memorial to carp. How 70 years ago! "Progressive" Dems—-and I use the term advisedly, since liberals seem more interested in preserving the past than in discovering the future—-are right to admire Roosevelt. But the Roosevelt they worship is a bronze sculpture, frozen in time. The real F.D.R. was a gutsy innovator. The current Democrats resemble nothing so much as the Republicans during the 25 years after Roosevelt's death-—negative, defensive, intellectually feeble, a permanent minority... undifferentiated opposition [to Bush] is obtuse and most likely counterproductive. The Democrats' current crudeness is a function of their desperation, and the imminent ratification of Howard Dean, the least charming presidential candidate in recent memory, as their party chairman only serves to punctuate the problem.

All of which leaves Bush with a lot of room to lead. His speech last week was striking... with the exceptions of his empty call for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage--a congressional nonstarter, but a sop to religious conservatives--and his continued refusal to support federal funding for new stem-cell-research lines.... There is... a profitable discussion to be had between "ownership" Republicans and "third-way" Democrats about transforming the stagnant bureaucracies of the Industrial Age... the stunned and churlish Democrats are refusing...

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Justin Logan Is Shrill!

2008-05-09T09:14:00.001-07:00

It's the Weekly Standard:

Cato-at-liberty » More Strategic Brilliance from Our Friends at the Weekly Standard: Here’s Michael Goldfarb:

As to whether Bush is a recruiting tool for terrorists–who cares? Al Qaeda was recruiting before Bush was in office and they will continue to do so after he’s gone. The important thing is that we keep killing those recruits. Eventually, one side will give up.

Do they edit this stuff before putting it up? By this logic, why don’t we airdrop a bunch of copies of Penthouse Letters into the Kabaa? After all, al Qaeda will continue recruiting whether we do it or not. Or maybe we could declare war on all of Islam. After all, al Qaeda was recruiting before we declared it. Or maybe we could send Senator McCain’s “moral compass and spiritual guide” onto al Hurra to tell Muslims that “America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed.” After all, it’s not like al Qaeda’s not recruiting today.

Robert Waldmann's Shrillness Threatens to Destroy the Universe

2008-05-02T11:24:00.001-07:00

Robert Waldmann is shrill:

WWW.WashingtonPost.com Manages to reach a new Low.

In the post below, I note the outrageous bias against Clinton and for McCain displayed on www.washingtonpost.com where the abstract of an article admits that McCain was the first to propose the egregious gas tax holiday, but the link under "most viewed articles" is labled "Clinton Gas-Tax Proposal Criticized."

It appears that the blatant contradiction between the article, which notes that McCain started it, and the link, which is written according to the rule that the words "McCain" and "Criticized" must not appear in the same seentence, has been noticed.

Thus the unmentionable fact has been removed from the abstract of the article which appears on www.washingtonpost.com. It has been edited to

Plan to Halt Gas Tax Criticized

Proposal supported by Clinton, McCain would offer little savings at the pump, economists say.

When I noted the earlier outrage, I didn't imagine that www.washingtonpost.com could do any worse. I certainly didn't guess that they would soon show even more outrageous bias in editing inconvenient but undeniable facts out from the same article.

update: Almost goes without saying that, by now (21:56 Rome time) all references to the fact that McCain has some connection with the proposal for a gasoline tax holliday has been removed from the front page of www.washingtonpost.com. Now we have just

Most Viewed Articles

* Trial Nearing, Alleged Call Girl Found Dead
* Clinton Gas-Tax Proposal Criticized

and

More Headlines
# Clinton Gas-Tax Proposal Criticized

The deceased alleged call girl is not Deborah Jeane Palfrey also featured on the page. That's two deaths in the great war on prostitution reported in one day.

posted by Robert permalink and comments8:43 PM

Washington Post.com totally in the tank for McCain

The Story as it appears on WWW.WashingtonPost.com

Economists Criticize Proposal to Halt Gas Tax

Plan first offered by Sen. John McCain, supported by Sen. Hillary Clinton, would spike demand, offer little savings at the pump, many economists say.

Alec MacGillis and Steven Mufson

But that's not all. It also appears under

"Most Viewed Articles"

With (as always) a slightly different headline and (as usual) the gross extreme blatant explicit shameful pro McCain bias is obvious and undeniable

the new headline written by someone whose name should not be hidden from the public is

" * Clinton Gas-Tax Proposal Criticized"

There it is, all on the web page (which I have, of course, saved).

On the very same web page the proposal is correctly described as "first offered by Sen. John McCain" and as "Clinton Gas-Tsx Proposal".

Maybe www.washingtonpost.com should just officially declare that they have decided that any facts which are embarrassing to John McCain are not to be reported.

Screen Shot with my higlighting in pale pale yellow

update: The Editorial suggests that the editorial board of the dead tree Washington Post is as in the tank as the nameless web page technician. They denounce the "Gas Tax Gotcha" writing "Alas, that hope was not warranted in the case of Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has followed Republican John McCain in recommending a suspension of the federal gas tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day."

Odd phrasing. Ink and some shred of credibility would have been saved if they had written "Alas, that hope was not warranted in the cases of Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republican John McCain" but they chose not to. Why is the grammatical position of Clinton and McCain so different ? More importantly, why did the Washington Post editorial board wait until Clinton joined McCain in demagoguery to denounce it ?

There is no doubt in my mind that the explanations are that the Washington Post Editorial board is unwilling to denounce McCain without also denouncing a Democrat.

However, I may be influenced by the gross monstrous bias demonstrated by www.washingtonpost.com which is a separate organization (with the same owners).

www.washingtonpost.com is my browser home page. I was a huge fan of the Washington Post starting, I blush to say, when I saw the film All The President's Men (at the time I followed Watergate on TV and in Newsweek (hey I was only 13 when Nixon resigned)). I read the full page advertizement for themselves "All the Presidents Men. If you liked the film, you'll love the Newspaper" with joy appreciated their just pride. I bristled when people said the New York Times was a better newspaper.

I am sure that there is something the Washington Post could do to regain my trust. I can't imagine what it is, but it must be possible.

posted by Robert permalink and comments6:55 PM

Willed to Shrillnes

2008-04-19T01:11:00.001-07:00

Close enough to shrill:

Popular Will, by Jonathan Chait: Barack Obama's comments about the white working class have thrown the political campaign into a particularly comic spasm of pretense and hypocrisy, but I was planning to let it go, I really was, until George F. Will decided to leap to the defense of the proletariat. Yes, that George F. Will. The fabulously wealthy, bow tie-wearing, pretentious reference-mongering, Anglophilic fop who grew up in a university town as a professor's son, earned two advanced degrees, has a designated table at a French restaurant in Georgetown, and, had he dwelt for any extended time among the working class, would be lucky to escape without his underwear being yanked up over his ears. …

TBogg Is Shrill!

2008-04-08T10:02:00.001-07:00

He has a Shorter Ross Douthat:

: A horrifyingly mutilated, yet living, body might still crawl out of the flaming wreckage that is the Bush years and then he and I shall both be vindicated.

Here is Ross:

Ross Douthat (April 07, 2008) - The Worst President Ever? (Politics): An unscientific survey of 109 professional historians, conducted by the doubtless-unbiased author of Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion In America, reports that sixty-one percent of its sample considers George W. Bush's Presidency the "worst ever." Remarking on this, er, finding, Matt takes the contrarian view that "Bush is probably correct to think that history will remember him kindly." I wouldn't go nearly that far (and nor would Matt, I suspect, if you really pressed him), but I will say, as someone who judges the Bush Administration more or less a failure, that it's very easy for me to imagine a possible future in which Bush's policies are widely judged to have been vindicated by events. (I have a piece on just this possibility forthcoming in the June issue of the Atlantic.) It's also easy to imagine a future in which Bush ends up more or less forgotten - along the lines of William McKinley, say, whose Presidency Karl Rove famously set out to emulate, with the Iraq War swallowed up by the same amnesia that's claimed our bloody and misguided adventures in the Phillipines. And yes, it's also easy to imagine a future in which Bush ends up judged not only a failure, but a worse chief executive than James Buchanan and Herbert Hoover - though for this to happen, I would submit, the worst Bush-created disasters would have to still be ahead of us, since neither the occupation of Iraq nor anything else our current POTUS has been involved in rivals the Civil War or the Great Depression for sheer destructive impact.

All of which is to say that sixty-one percent of the historians' sample are ax-grinding fools whose nitwittery dishonors their profession. Judge Bush a failure by all means, but the fact that his legacy is only beginning its long unspooling ought to give anyone with even a glancing knowledge of history's cunning passages - let alone a so-called "professional" - pause before pronouncing his administration the worst in American history.

Wow!

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Him Now

2008-04-01T10:37:00.001-07:00

Matthew Yglesias:

Matthew Yglesias (March 31, 2008) - The Horror (Foreign Policy): There was a time when I never could have imagined I'd be reading stuff like this about my own country:

At the age of 19, Murat Kurnaz vanished into America's shadow prison system in the war on terror. He was from Germany, traveling in Pakistan, and was picked up three months after 9/11. But there seemed to be ample evidence that Kurnaz was an innocent man with no connection to terrorism. The FBI thought so, U.S. intelligence thought so, and German intelligence agreed. But once he was picked up, Kurnaz found himself in a prison system that required no evidence and answered to no one...

Read the whole thing; I don't really have the heart to make a witty remark.

Only those people who embrace the idea of being evil and think that evil is cool have any business voting for the Republican Party ever again. Ever. Again.

Paul Berman Is a Deeply Broken Person

2008-04-01T10:29:00.001-07:00

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Duncan Black writes:

Eschaton: Stars Of Their Own Heroic Epic: Years later, it's hard to comprehend the depths of the narcissism of people like [Paul] Berman who obviously see events in the world as nothing more than referendums on their own awesomeness. He and his fellow travelers spent years berating dirty fucking hippies like me for daring to suggest that maybe war in Iraq was not some awesome idea, but instead, you know, bad. And now he wants to claim he opposed it?

This a deeply broken person.

He is reacting to Spencer Ackerman, who drops his jaw in amazement:

toohotfortnr: public witness ain't seeing too much: Paul Berman did a BloggingHeads with Heather Hulburt in which the arch liberal-Iraq-hawk strongly suggests that he didn't support the war. You be the judge. Relevant section is about 2:30 in.

On the Iraq war, I myself wrote a piece in The New Republic on March -- which came out in the March 3, 2003 issue saying George Bush was leading us over a cliff. And that his notion of how to deploy power was lacking in liberal principle and that his use of power was going to turn out to be no power at all. In short it was going to be a disaster. I published this before the war. I made that prediction before the war. It's true that afterward I haven't made a career of running around saying I told you so, but if you look it up, the major article ... yeah, I was in favor of getting rid of Saddam but Bush's way of going about it was quite bad, and I pronounced myself, I used the word 'terrified,' of what would come of it.

TNR's messed-up web archives have erased Paul's article.... But it doesn't say what Paul says it says.... Leave aside his odious arrogance. (He told me so?) Paul says his piece recognized Bush's strategic foolishness and illiberalism. He's right. The trouble is he recognized it as a caveat to his enthusiasm to the war, not as an impediment. In other words, Berman wanted a war for liberalism, recognized that it wouldn't be one, and backed it anyway. That -- to say the least -- implicates his judgment.

In order to whitewash this, he pretends his caveat was his argument. He did this before, in the New York Review of Books, where he quoted his caveat and said it rose "rising to what I like to picture as a crescendo." Well, it wasn't a crescendo. It would only have been a crescendo if it stopped him from backing the war. Instead he took the opposite approach. Fine. But own up to it, don't pretend that wasn't your judgment.

Update: Oh God. Toward the end of the clip, Paul says:

Then there's the intellectual debate. The intellectual debate should always tell the truth. It should never be modest. It should always be grandiose.

Please, please, please, step back from the cliff...

And to Matthew Yglesias:

Matthew Yglesias (November 12, 2007) - Did Paul Berman Tell Us So? (Foreign Policy): In the midst of an argument with Ian Buruma, liberal hawk extraordinaire Paul Berman tries to convince us that he actually called Iraq correctly, and has merely been magnanimous in not pointing that out:

I approved on principle the overthrow of Saddam. I never did approve of Bush's way of going about it. In the run-up to the war, I became, on practical grounds, ever more fearful that, in his blindness to liberal principles, Bush was leading us over a cliff. [...] It is true and it is a matter of satisfaction to me that, in the years since then, I have not made a career of saying "I told you so."

Here's what Berman was actually writing in February 2003:

In my own judgment, Fischer and his fellow thinkers in Europe and even in the United States are making a mistake in failing to press for a harder line against Iraq--a harder line that might bring about Saddam's collapse more or less peacefully or, if need be, not peacefully. It should be obvious that, in the Arab world, fascist and Nazi-like movements--political tendencies that call for random mass murder in the name of paranoid and apocalyptic ideas--have gotten completely out of hand. In the last 20 years, Baathist and Islamist movements--the two branches of what ought to be regarded as Muslim fascism--have killed millions of people and might well kill many more, and not just in the Muslim countries, as we have reason to know. A war against Muslim fascism ought to be seen as a continuation of the long struggle against Nazism and fascism in Europe--a continuation of the same decent and necessary cause that people like Fischer have always wanted to support, even if they have not always known how to do so in a sensible way.

He was worried about Bush's failure to embrace liberalism, but it wasn't a worry that this meant the war would go badly, it was a worry that Bush wasn't being as rhetorically persuasive as he should have been:

Maybe Fischer is not convinced because the Bush administration has presented a series of side arguments about weapons, U.N. resolutions, and dark terrorist conspiracies and has failed to present the main argument, which is the single huge argument that has always sustained the Western alliance. This argument is the one about totalitarianism. It is the argument that says: The totalitarians are dangerous to themselves and to us, and we had better fight them. Fight wisely, of course, which the New Left notoriously managed not to do long ago, but fight. Why can't Bush make that argument? I won't speculate. But he could change. He gave up drinking long ago. Let him give up his arrogance, small-mindedness, and aversion to large and idealistic ideas today. It might help.

And here he was in January 2004 when many people still thought the war was going well:

What was the reason for the war in Iraq? Sept. 11 was the reason. At least to my mind it was. Sept. 11 showed that totalitarianism in its modern Muslim version was not going to stop at slaughtering millions of Muslims, and hundreds of Israelis, and attacking the Indian government, and blowing up American embassies. The totalitarian manias were rising, and the United States itself was now in danger. A lot of people wanted to respond, as any mayor would do, by rounding up a single Bad Guy, Osama.

But Sept. 11 did not come from a single Bad Guy--it was a product of the larger totalitarian wave, and the only proper response was to comprehend the size and depth of that larger wave, and find ways to begin rolling it back, militarily and otherwise%u2014mostly otherwise. To roll it back for our own sake, and everyone else's sake, Muslims' especially. Iraq, with its somewhat antique variation of the Muslim totalitarian idea, was merely a place to begin, after Afghanistan, with its more modern variation.

In short, Berman was wrong. The reason he hasn't made a career of telling us "I told you so" is that, in this instance at least, he didn't tell us so. But now he's trying to tell us that he did tell us so. But all he told us was that had Bush employed more Berman-style rhetoric then maybe more of Berman's friends would, like Berman, have wrongly deciding that an invasion of Iraq was a good idea.

Paul Berman may or may not be the stupidest man alive^TM. But he surely is the most mendacious man alive.

For the record, I was in favor of the war on Iraq in the winter of 2003. I reasoned:

Condi Rice is not-stupid and not-malevolent, and is for the war.
Colin Powell is not-stupd and not-malevolent, and is for the war.
This means that even though the public intelligence is bs, that there must be solid evidence of an advanced nuclear program in Iraq and of a willingness to give serious weapons to terrorist groups--otherwise attacking Iraq while we have real enemies like Osama bin Laden running loose would be really stupid.
And although Bush is really stupid, not everyone in the administration is.

Wrong on all counts. I am very sorry.

I may be the stupidest man alive.

Glenn Greenwald Is Super-Shrill!

2008-03-23T12:32:00.001-07:00

Glenn Reynolds links to Instapunk a whole lot:

This drives Glenn Greenwald into hypershrillness:

One of Instapundit's favorite blogs speaks on race - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com: Just two weeks ago, Instapundit (which is, revealingly enough, one of Karl Rove's favorite blogs) promoted and praised a separate post on race by Instapunk, which proclaimed that (h/t Zack):

Barack Obama "is none of us";

"in his heart of hearts Obama understands nothing and no one, because he has never belonged anywhere or truly participated in anything";

"It's Michelle Obama who hates America";

it's feminists who have "done more to destroy the black family and promote the epidemic of children born out of wedlock than any conspiracy Jeremiah Wright could ever dream up"; and,

"Even though Obama is not and never was an African-American, he has always been black enough to benefit from the superannuated slave culture that forgives every corruption and hypocrisy in those who have any claim on being black."

Reynolds is promoting ugly bile of this sort for one simple reason -- because, as always, exploiting racial resentments is one of the principal tribalistic weapons on which the Right intends to rely in order to win the election. As one blogger just wrote via email:

What I don't understand is why Glenn R. continues to visit and link to a blog where such racist sentiments are permitted to be posted. He must be aware that InstaPunk is a blog that permits contributors to spout venomous racial hatred. Why doesn't he find another blog to visit? I mean, if it were me, I would not keep up an association with a blog that thinks it's okay to let a contributor be so hateful. Why doesn't he disavow this guy?

As Reynolds himself wrote the other day about Obama: "Obama is giving us a 'national conversation on race,' but mostly by letting a lot of white people realize just what circulates, unremarked, in the black community." I believe that's similar to the way that the blogs and posts Instapundit promotes "let a lot of people realize just what circulates, unremarked, in the right-wing sewers."

Hilzoy Is Shrill!

2008-03-22T16:15:00.001-07:00

Hilzoy: The fact that Hillary Rodham Clinton can't tell the difference between having an eight year old read her a poem on a tarmac and fleeing through a hail of bullets doesn't give me a lot of confidence in her grasp of military affairs...

Obsidian Wings: "We Just Ran With Our Heads Down": A few days ago, Hillary Clinton described her 1996 trip to Bosnia:

"I certainly do remember that trip to Bosnia, and as Togo said, there was a saying around the White House that if a place was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn't go, so send the First Lady. That's where we went. I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."

Even before Sinbad challenged Clinton's account, I was skeptical: as I read somewhere (sorry, don't remember where), does it really make sense to suppose that if the trip was that dangerous, the President would have sent not just his wife but his only child on it?

Now, however, there is video of Clinton running with her head down through the hail of bullets. Except for, um, the running part, and the bullets part, and the part about the greeting ceremony being cancelled. It's worth watching to see the perils Senator Clinton endured. And it does support her story in one respect: as you can see in this picture, she did bend her head down on the tarmac, to hug an eight year old girl who had just read her a poem.

Harrowing stuff. No doubt all the nonexistent bullets flying around account for the fact that none of the reporters who were present mentioned any danger at the time. Obviously, they were so terrified that they repressed it all.

Honestly: there was no need for Clinton to do any of this. She did play a serious policy role in her husband's administration (even if she didn't help pass the Family and Medical Leave Act, as she claims.) The only reason for her to inflate a trip with Sinbad and Sheryl Crow into a serious diplomatic mission, and a trip to Northern Ireland involving "a visit to a women's drop-in centre and two business parks" into helping bring peace to Northern Ireland, is that by pretending to have been more involved in foreign policy than she really was, she can pretend that while Barack Obama isn't ready to be commander in chief, she is.

Frankly, though, the fact that she can't tell the difference between having an eight year old read her a poem on a tarmac and fleeing through a hail of bullets doesn't give me a lot of confidence in her grasp of military affairs. Who knows? If she were President, she might decide that she was under attack by helicopter gunships when she was actually standing in a perfectly peaceful receiving line at a state funeral, and declare war. If she thinks the video I linked to shows her running for safety in a hail of bullets, anything is possible.

McCain: Clueless as... as... Saying that Some Neo-Confederate Group Is Secretly Funneling Money to Louis Farrakhan

2008-03-18T20:39:00.001-07:00

Hilzoy is the shrillest woman in the Boswash Megalopolis:

Obsidian Wings: Clueless: I didn't want to let this gem from John McCain pass unremarked:

Sen. John McCain, traveling in the Middle East to promote his foreign policy expertise, misidentified in remarks Tuesday which broad category of Iraqi extremists are allegedly receiving support from Iran.

He said several times that Iran, a predominately Shiite country, was supplying the mostly Sunni militant group, al-Qaeda. In fact, officials have said they believe Iran is helping Shiite extremists in Iraq.

Speaking to reporters in Amman, the Jordanian capital, McCain said he and two Senate colleagues traveling with him continue to be concerned about Iranian operatives "taking al-Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back."

Pressed to elaborate, McCain said it was "common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that's well known. And it's unfortunate." A few moments later, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, standing just behind McCain, stepped forward and whispered in the presidential candidate's ear. McCain then said: "I'm sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaeda."

It's important to be clear about exactly how clueless this is. It's like saying that some neo-confederate group is secretly funneling money to Louis Farrakhan, and then having an aide have to whisper: no, no, it's the Aryan Nation; wrong extremists! It's like suggesting that McCain is making a play for Kucinich voters, and having to be told that, no, you really meant Ron Paul: wrong losing candidate! No one who had any understanding at all of Iraq, or for that matter about the Shi'a/Sunni split and which side Iran was on, would get confused about this....

McCain gets to say silly things like this without being challenged. His reputation as a serious thinker on national security can only survive so long as people don't notice things like this....

Today we saw exactly how intelligent and nuanced Obama is. In this series of remarks by McCain (and others; it's not unique), we can see exactly how unprepared he is to win an argument against Obama.

In terms of intellect, grasp of policy details, nuance, and depth of knowledge, McCain is just not in Obama's league -- or, for that matter, Clinton's. When we have a chance to see McCain debate a Democratic nominee, I have every confidence that this fact will become painfully obvious.

Thoreau Is Shrill. Really Shrill

2008-03-18T20:11:00.001-07:00

It is CNN's fault:

Thoreau: Suddenly I Am More Outraged than Ever: Last night, on CNN, during one of the segments the background on the screen said "Iraq: Success or Failure?" And I just exploded. Of course it's a failure. When a marketplace is so dangerous that a Senator can't even go there with 100+ heavily armed men (recall that McCain could no longer visit the same market that he visited last year and proclaimed "safe" while surrounded by heavy security), thats one hell of a goddamn failure.

And it hit me: The media doesn't invite the Flat Earth Society to "discuss the controversy" every time they show a picture of the globe. They don't invite a North Korean official to argue that his country isn't a shithole when they want to do a story on North Korea. They don't invite NAMBLA to offer an opposing perspective when somebody is accused of child molestation. And they don't give a guest column in leading publications to a cheerleader for the Libyan regime. Yet when somebody wants to show up and argue that Iraq is a success story, that torture (fricking torture!) is OK, that unchecked executive power is just peachy, they invite that person onto the show and thank him. Instead of reporting the abuses of power they treat the apologists as honored guests.

No, I don't want a partisan media. But I do want a media with a better bullshit detector, one that doesn't feel the need to bend over backwards to be "fair" whenever somebody wants to say that torture and unchecked power are necessary to defend freedom. I want a media that won't let somebody show up and defend torture, treat him as a Serious Person, and then thank him for appearing on the show. Some shit is just plain wrong, but if you don't say that, if you treat the advocates for it as another perspective deserving equal time, then the crimes that are going on are perceived as "controversies" rather than blatant crimes. And that makes it impossible to be taken "seriously" when you argue in favor of treating this stuff as crimes, and impeaching those responsible.

Well I'm done with that. No more courtesy. Yes, there are genuinely hard questions in life, and we need open and respectful debate on those issues. But just as I wouldn't waste my time holding a debate with a Klansman every time he wants to insist that non-whites really are inferior, I'm not going to waste my time treating the hawks as Serious People. They aren't serious people. They're just plain wrong. And we need to say that, instead of giving them equal time and thanking them for spewing their BS.

Mind you, I of course favor the right of anybody to say what he wants. The First Amendment says that you can say anything you like. It doesn't say that you are entitled to guest appearances in high profile forums. If somebody tried to force a hawk off the stage I'd defend his right to speak. But I'd also say that the owner of the stage is an idiot for inviting him. (And I'd insert the libertarian disclaimer that the owner of the stage naturally has a right to invite anybody to speak on his private property, but I would reiterate that the owner of the stage is an idiot for treating the hawk like a Serious Person.)

I realize that this can go in a dangerous direction. I don't want to close all minds on all things and say that everything is black and white. But, you know, some shades of gray do in fact come awfully close to one or the other end of the spectrum. If the Flat Earth folks don't get invites to Serious Forums, if our media would never think of giving equal time to the commander of an Iranian torture chamber, why would they give equal time to the defenders of American torture?

I fear where this is taking me, but at the same time I know that some lines really do have to be drawn. At some point you have to say that an idea has been sufficiently discredited that it's time to move on and stop treating its proponents like the Serious People that they insist they are. As long as the worst ideas in circulation are treated as Serious, it's impossible to hold their proponents accountable because what they do is not a crime but merely a controversial decision.

Brendan Nyhan: Chris Matthews: Ignorant about policy

2008-03-14T21:12:00.001-07:00

Brendan Nyhan is shrill!:

Brendan Nyhan: Chris Matthews: Ignorant about policy: Despite my extremely low opinion of Matthews, this is still staggering. He's on TV every day and he has no idea what the Democrats are proposing on the most important domestic policy issue in this election. None!

To paraphrase Brad DeLong's saying about Bush, Matthews is worse than I imagined possible, even after taking into account the fact that he is worse than I imagined possible. But as Somerby (obsessively) points out, most pundits won't say anything about him because they want to go on "Hardball" and raise their profile.

Cactus: We Don't Live in a Meritocracy, Exhibit A

2008-03-14T20:08:00.001-07:00

Cactus is shrill:

Angry Bear: We Don't Live in a Meritocracy, Exhibit A: Kudlow this morning:

I%u2019ll be sitting down for an exclusive one-on-one interview with President Bush later this morning in midtown Manhattan. The interview will air tonight on Kudlow & Company

....

We'll discuss the economy, oil prices, housing, the credit crunch, Hill-Bama and McCain, the Spitzer scandal, the war on terror and more.

It wasn't that long ago that Kudlow was prattling incessantly about how the Bush economy was "the greatest story never told", or at least a "goldilocks economy". He used both terms in the same paragraph in January. And we've had enough posts here at Angry Bear questioning GW's awareness of how the economy works.

In effect, Kudlow interviewing the President is reminiscent of a high school cheerleader interviewing the school's quarterback (who she happens to be dating) for the high school newspaper after he's been sacked five times in a game, all of which follows months of bragging by the two of them about how his footwork makes him unstoppable. I'll confess a certain morbid curiosity, but not enough to watch it.

Hilzoy Is Shrill!

2008-03-07T15:58:00.001-08:00

Hillary Rodham Clinton has done it to her:

Obsidian Wings: Crossing The Threshold: However, let's assume, for the sake of argument, that [Hillary Rodham Clinton] actually believes that Barack Obama cannot "cross the commander-in-chief threshold." One of the most important jobs a President has is to defend the country. If she thinks that Barack Obama is not qualified to do that job, then she should not support him over anyone who can. Specifically, she should support McCain over Obama.

That's why I think some enterprising reporter should ask her whether she would support Barack Obama if he were nominated. If she would, then she should be asked why she would be willing to support someone she does not believe is qualified to be commander in chief.

Whatever her answer, it would tell us something we need to know: either that her doubts about Obama are so serious that she would not be willing to support the nominee of her own party, or that she would support someone she thinks is unfit to serve, or that she does not believe a word she said about Obama, and is willing to impugn a fellow Democrat's fitness to serve as President because her own interests matter more to her than her party's or the nation's.

Sadly, the Shrillness Begins

2008-03-02T11:41:00.001-08:00

Obama begins his additions to the legions at Shrillblog. From Brad at Sadly No:

Gulp, by Brad, Sadly No: Is it too late for me to take back my Obama vote?

Obama is hoping to appoint cross-party figures to his cabinet such as Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator for Nebraska and an opponent of the Iraq war, and Richard Lugar, leader of the Republicans on the Senate foreign relations committee.

I’ll be so depressed if he takes this “bipartisanship” nonsense seriously. Personally speaking, I’d like any Democratic candidate to spend their whole first day in office standing atop the White House roof dressed in pirate garb shouting “NOOOOOOOO PRISONERS!!!!!” at the top of their lungs. I want someone who will appoint Rudy Ray Moore as a Supreme Court justice, who will punish the Keyboard Kommandos by passing a Constitutional amendment banning Cheetos and Funyuns, and who will look into every Republican’s eyes and tell them that he drank their milkshake. HE DRANK IT UP!!!

As I’ve said before, there are more important issues facing this country than my bloody-minded quest for revenge. But even if Obama doesn’t plan on systematically destroy every Republican by using the Justice Department to slap them with bogus corruption charges, he could at the very least not appoint any to his cabinet. And while it’s true that Hagel and Lugar are some of the least objectionable Republicans out there, they are still Republicans. They bear the taint; and though not prosecutable in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot be ignored.

No prisoners, Hussein X. Please don’t disappoint me.

Roy Edroso Is Shrill!

2008-02-24T11:39:00.001-08:00

He writes, apropos of slut-shaming crunchy-cons: >alicublog: BIG-TIME NEGOTIATORS, FALSE HEALERS AND WOMAN-HATERS. A bride wants her wedding dress to reveal the tattoo on her back, and does not feel the need to appear virginal on her wedding day. So Rod Dreher calls her a slut. >It takes hours, and a visit from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to make Dreher retract the slur, though he still accuses the bride of "cheap morals" and "bad manners," and calls her behavior "slutty." Big difference. >Dreher frequently reminds us that Christians don't riot, as some Muslims do, when they perceive their values to be mocked. But he never recalls that for many, many centuries, Christians backed by the power of states harassed, exiled, and burned men and women who didn't conform to their prejudices in comportment or anything else. >When we mock Dreher here, we are not always thinking solely of the little fellow in Dallas who shakes his impotent fist at our times and manners. Often we also have in mind the loathsome traditions he wants to bring back to the civilized world, even praising the "order," "unity," and "purpose" of barbarous Islamic societies as a means of attracting us to a Western version with Jesus on top. Imagine a country where men like Dreher have the power to order a stoning. >It took us nearly two millenia and oceans of blood to reduce these savages to a noisome rump. We can spare a little attention to remember why we did it.

Helicopter Spin

2008-02-23T02:25:00.001-08:00

Why do I even bother to go to the NRO website? This article on the "truth about airborne dollar-drops and Federal Reserve policy" by Thomas Nugent is pretty confused:

Who’s Flying This Helicopter Anyway?, by Thomas E. Nugent, NRO Online: Wall Street pundits are quick to criticize the Federal Reserve for being either too “tight” or too “easy.” These terms refer to a Fed system that attempts to increase or decrease the money supply — by manipulating the federal funds interest rate — in order to influence the economy and inflation.

It's actually the other way around - the monetary base is manipulated to attain the target federal funds rate. But maybe that's being picky. Moving on:

In terms of the economy, the Fed believes it can sway the growth of consumer purchasing power — due to borrowing — in order to spend. Lower interest rates are thought to encourage both borrowing and credit expansion.

Not quite. Lower interest rates increase quantity of loans demanded, but credit expansion? Lower interest rates don't encourage more supply.

Next, the helicopter:

Now that the Fed has cut the target funds rate from 5.25 to 3 percent ... the critics are out in force. ... They ... say current Fed policy is inflationary, and to make their point they dust-off a decades-old analogy: Rather than merely tinkering with his various policy levers, they say the Fed chairman is out flying his helicopter, dumping bales of dollars on the economy.

Those who say that are using the wrong terminology unless they are referring to purchases of, say, mortgage backed securities at greater than market value. But that's not what they mean - they are referring to ordinary open market operations. That's not helicopter money.

Skipping forward, this next part mixes up consumption and saving, or something, but it is mixed up:

For every dollar borrowed in a lower-interest-rate environment, one dollar is saved. Thus, while lower interest rates may help borrowers spend, they reduce the spending of savers. Only to the extent that the propensity of these two groups to spend is different are interest rates expected to change demand.

How does lowering the interest rate reduce the spending of savers? If anything, lower interest rates discourage saving and promote consumption. In addition, unlike the claim in the paragraph, when a bank loans a dollar of someone's saving it doesn't reduce their consumption. And the part about the differing propensities to consume is referring to what happens when you take a tax dollar from someone with a relatively low propensity to consume and give it back to someone with a higher propensity. But that's not what's going on when interest rates are lowered so it doesn't apply here. This makes no sense at all.

Anyway, moving on:

All this is not to say that a dollar-dropping helicopter doesn’t exist. In certainly does, and standing at the ready are its pilot and co-pilot: the president and Congress.

When the U.S. gets in trouble, the government writes the checks. And when those checks are circulated the proverbial helicopter goes airborne and opens its dollar-dumping doors. Sometimes this is a good thing. Our pilot and co-pilot are to be commended for the several hundred billion they have thus far dropped on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the $50 billion they marked for a targeted drop on the Gulf Coast regions devastated by Katrina and Rita.

There is, of course, the swing from a $200 billion surplus under Bill Clinton to a $500 billion deficit under George W. Bush. Either the government helicopter has been extra busy in recent years or Bush traded in for a bigger one.

Sorry, but that's just wrong and misleading terminology. Deficit spending is not a helicopter drop.

He makes the same mistake here (a money financed tax cut is just like helicopter money, but the statement about a larger deficit in the next paragraph reveals that he isn't thinking about this case):

You may agree or disagree with the purpose of much of the Bush administration spending, and that’s fine. One pending helicopter dollar-drop that has drawn my rebuke is the Keynesian demand-side tax-rebate plan agreed upon by the president and Congress. It is designed to put “money in people’s pockets,” and that it will. But it will also produce larger deficits for no good reason.

Interestingly, when he is advocating a supply-side policy, the “mistake” is avoided:

If you really want to stimulate greater economic activity, the supply-side is the best way to go: Lower tax rates across the board. Bush and Congress got this right in 2003. They blew it in 2008.

By the definition he uses above, lowering taxes is a helicopter drop, but for the tax cuts he likes the helicopter only flies over wealthy neighborhoods. That explains why he suddenly drops the incorrect helicopter drop label in describing the policy. The incorrect label is only used when he wants to try to undermine policies at odds with his political ideology.

The article ends with:

While your rebate checks are being written, however, at least you now have the answer to the ubiquitous helicopter mystery: Fiscal policy is the “culprit,” and the Fed is just along for the ride.

The only people being taken for a ride or those who believe this nonsense.

Kevin Drum is Shrill

2008-02-22T11:57:00.001-08:00

It's Bill Keller of the New York Times, who has no business being a journalist anymore.

Kevin writes:

The Washington Monthly: THE TIMES SPEAKS....Really, this is unbelievable. Here is New York Times executive editor Bill Keller in an online Q&A declaring himself surprised by both the volume and the lopsidedness of the reaction to Wednesday's John McCain non-affair story:

And, frankly, I was a little surprised by how few readers saw what was, to us, the larger point of the story. Perhaps here, at the outset of this conversation, is a good point to state as clearly as possible our purpose in publishing. [Blah blah blah] The point of this "Long Run" installment was that, according to people who know him well, this man who prizes his honor above all things and who appreciates the importance of appearances also has a history of being sometimes careless about the appearance of impropriety, about his reputation. The story cites several examples, and quotes friends and admirers talking of this apparent contradiction in his character. That is why some members of his staff were so alarmed by the appearance of his relationship with Ms. Iseman. And that, it seemed (and still seems) to us, was something our readers would want to know about a man who aspires to be president.

The "larger point." Right. This is just embarrassing. Everybody with a pulse knows that no one is criticizing the Times for reporting that McCain was doing the bidding of a lobbyist and campaign contributor. Rather, this story has gotten saturation coverage because the Times has been careful to refer to Vicki Iseman as a "female lobbyist" on practically every occasion it can %u2014 including the introduction to the very Q&A Keller is taking part in. Times reader aren't children. We all know what this means, and we all know perfectly well that the Times piece loudly insinuated some kind of inappropriate romantic involvement between McCain and Iseman. So far, though, the Q&A has addressed only the peripheral subjects of what "Long Run" pieces are like, what the Times' policy on anonymous sources is, and the Chinese wall between the newsroom and the editorial page staff. Riveting stuff.

And the elephant in the room? Missing in action so far. Do you think they'll ever get to it?

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

No, National Review Is Not Better than It Used to Be

2008-02-20T16:17:00.001-08:00

For some reason, John Holbo does not deploy his Filmerian patriarchal powers to prohibit his wife Belle Waring from reading National Review. I hope she has not done permanent damage to her mighty Krell-like brain:

John & Belle Have A Blog: Nasty: Sometimes I read old articles from the National Review and I think, where did that spirit of frank, open racism go? Why must John Derbyshire be restrained by political correctness when he "wraps his silk dressing gown tightly about his withered frame and totters onto the balcony to address the Negro Question"? But along comes sweet, sweet Lisa "Clinton really was running drugs through Mena AK" Schffrin....

Barack Obama is the new man, of course. His mixed race is a symbol of that. Just like Tiger Woods — as we have read, endlessly. What's to wonder about? But maybe it's not so simple.... [A]ll of my mixed race, black/white classmates... were always the offspring of a white mother... and usually a highly educated black father... [met in] the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics....

[T]he Kincaid article... makes a very convincing case that Obama's family... had close relations with a known black Communist... Frank Marshall Davis — appears to have been Barack's own mentor, and even a father figure.....

Political correctness was invented precisely to prevent the mainstream liberal media from persuing the questions which might arise.... It was, of course, an explicit tactic of the Communist party to stir up discontent among American blacks.... To their credit, of course, most black Americans didn't buy the commie line — and showed more faith in the possibilities of democratic change than in radical politics, and the results on display in Moscow. Time for some investigative journalism about the Obama family's background, now that his chances of being president have increased so much.

The truly beautiful thing about this is that it incoherently wavers between two poles of repulsive slander: is it Communist Negroes having sex with our white women? Or are Communist Jewesses subverting black Americans who, patriotic though modestly ill-treated, would have been able to resist had the party not offered them the tempting fruits of miscegenation? Whatever it is I imagine it's music to WFB's ears. His trembling hand hoists a generous 7:30am brandy and milk to you, Lisa!

Eric Boehlert: Poetic justice: Limbaugh tries to tear GOP apart

2008-02-18T12:32:00.001-08:00

Media Matters - Poetic justice: Limbaugh tries to tear GOP apart: Rush Limbaugh, the marauding Frankenstein's monster of the Republican Party, is on the loose again, causing all kinds of political damage with his signature off-balance swings. But as has become his custom recently, the pain from Limbaugh's rampage is being felt by his creators -- his enablers -- inside the GOP.

Limbaugh and the rest of his get-John McCain brain trust -- Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin, and campus instigator Ann Coulter -- have been tripping over themselves to get in front of a microphone (preferably a television one) to denounce the Republican Party's presumptive nominee and to suggest that perhaps conservatives should even vote Democratic come November.

After years of watching Limbaugh and his various band of midnight riders within the Republican Noise Machine launch countless, hateful crusades against liberals and Democrats, it's extraordinarily satisfying to watch the Republican Party leadership discover what it feels like when Limbaugh sets his venomous, factually challenged sights on their own front-runner.

For progressives, the sprawling GOP brawl is what blogger TRex would call a schadenfreude sundae. What could be more enjoyable than watching McCain get bogged down in the far-right swamp? Answer: Watching a handful of right-wing pundits come to the belated conclusion that Limbaugh is a dunce. Or, as one Weekly Standard blogger put it last week, the Limbaugh-led response to McCain was "unhinged -- and at times spectacularly disgraceful." And Dinesh D'Souza concluded, that, yes, Limbaugh is an "egomaniac" who "has grown accustomed to conservative bigwigs worshiping at the Shrine of Rush." (Truth is, Limbaugh's not that well liked among Republicans.)

Really? Limbaugh is spreading misinformation? He's wallowing in demagoguery while bordering on megalomania? He and his pals appear to be far more interested in the number of media mentions they rack up than they do in advancing the conservative movement? Ah, what a tangled web the GOP weaves. Wonder how McCain and the Republican Party minions enjoy following behind Limbaugh's broadcast each weekday with a bucket and shovel, cleaning up the mess spread all over the floor. Enjoy!

But this is what Republicans created. They wanted Limbaugh to be an attack dog and to chew up and spit out his/the party's opponents. They wanted him to label Democrats as traitors ("What's good for Al Qaeda is good for the Democratic Party in this country today"), to label them abhorrent and mentally deranged. They wanted Limbaugh to ignore any semblance of decency when demonizing the other side. Indeed, there has been virtually no offensive line that Limbaugh has crossed that Republicans have not dutifully justified or explained away.

Even last year when Limbaugh denigrated members of the U.S. armed forces, calling military men and women who criticized the war in Iraq and advocated withdrawal "phony soldiers," what did the GOP do? It rushed to Limbaugh's defense.

The pats on the back came from presidential contender Fred Thompson and Senate Republican Conference chairman Jon Kyl (AZ), and House Minority Leader John Boehner (OH) as well as his No. 2, Roy Blunt (MO), along with fellow Reps. Mike Pence (IN), Scott Garrett (NJ). Mean Rep. Marsha Blackburn (TN) supported legislation that commended Limbaugh following his "phony soldiers" crack. Rep. Eric Cantor (VA) even unveiled a Stand With Rush e-petition, urging "conservatives around the country" to fight for Limbaugh.

Oh, and let's not forget Mitt Romney's reaction to the "phony soldiers" controversy, which was priceless. (Romney was the candidate Limbaugh championed as the one true conservative in this year's Republican race.) Romney flip-flopped! Here he is momentarily chastising Limbaugh's comments. And here Romney is, just days later, as he "rushes to the defense of Rush Limbaugh." (And Republicans used to claim that candidate Al Gore had no moral compass?)

Meanwhile, it really was rather sad to watch former Sen. Bob Dole last week write a letter to Limbaugh trying to reason with the talk-show host about whether candidate McCain was sufficiently conservative. Or when McCain himself suggested that the talk show hosts simply "calm down." Or when Bud McFarlane, former national security adviser to President Reagan, took to the pages of The Wall Street Journal over the weekend to urge Rush and his angry pack to "be rational."

Rational? Where have these Republicans been for the last decade? The Noise Machine doesn't do rational. Was Limbaugh being "rational" when he toasted photos of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib as "good old American pornography"? Was Malkin being rational last year when she attempted to Swift Boat a traumatically injured 12-year-old boy? Was Coulter being rational ... well, ever?

Sorry, GOP grown-ups. If there's one thing the Republican Noise Machine is allergic to, it's reason. And decency, and respect, and rational behavior.

And besides, why is it left to retired Republican graybeards like Dole and McFarlane to try to broker peace with the Limbaugh crowd? McCain, the party's presumptive nominee, is being savaged by a corral of radio talk-show hosts every day, and yet the silence among Republican elected officials has been deafening. Why? Because they're too afraid to stick up for their own candidate, too afraid Limbaugh and his wannabes will try burn somebody else at the stake.

I don't think progressives could have choreographed a better media meltdown if we tried.

Fact is, every time Limbaugh causes a controversy these days, the Democratic Party's political fortunes rise just a little bit -- like when he's treating McCain like a bum, or degrading phony soldiers, or mocking actor Michael J. Fox for allegedly faking the symptoms of his crippling Parkinson's disease while appearing in a Democratic-sponsored campaign ad.

What's so spectacular for the home team is that Limbaugh's crusade to demolish McCain stems from the radical right's fervent desire to cleanse the Republican Party of those who are deemed to be insufficiently pure in their conservative beliefs. And it's not just the candidates. Limbaugh has been clear that his deep disdain for McCain is driven by the fact that he might attract voters in the fall -- the wrong voters -- who do not adhere to the radical right's litmus test of right and wrong.

What Limbaugh and company are doing with their diatribes is launching political correctness into the stratosphere, and in the process herding voters toward the Democratic camp.

The best part? The whole crusade has been a colossal flop. On the eve of the Super Tuesday primary, lots of cogs in the Republican Noise Machine demanded that their readers and listeners embrace Mitt Romney.

Instead, McCain and Mike Huckabee -- the other GOP candidate deemed totally unworthy by the mighty Limbaugh -- pretty much ran the table and shoved the anointed one, Romney, right out of the race. I'd suggest the stunning failure to move the needle even an inch among self-identified Republican voters represented a nice punctuation point on the Republican Noise Machine's collapse, which, naturally, has closely mirrored President Bush's downward spiral. (The same post-Bush tremors are being felt at Fox News; read about their ratings woes here.)

Why did the get-McCain gambit fail so miserably? Maybe Republican voters saw through the transparent attacks. After all, Limbaugh himself wrote a column for The Wall Street Journal during the 2004 presidential campaign in which he commended McCain for being among the "unabashed and unashamed advocates of conservative principles and policies" in his speech at the Republican convention.

And if Limbaugh's uncontrollable disdain for McCain is based on that candidate's allegedly leftward drift on the issues, then why didn't Limbaugh try to run Rudy Giuliani out of the race? (Not that Rudy needed any help.) Giuliani's history of supporting abortion rights, embryonic stem-cell research, and gay rights makes McCain look like Ronald Reagan's long-lost brother.

And I'm sorry, but Romney as the conservative true believer? Baystaters must have spit up their Summer Shack clam chowder when they heard that line. In a manic attempt to veer right for his White House run, Romney flip-flopped on a buffet of supposedly core Republican issues, such as immigration reform, abortion, gun control, tax cuts, and gay rights. (Go here to watch Romney perform one of the purest flip-flops ever captured on tape.)

More likely, Limbaugh is just wildly out of touch with the Republican Party. During President Bush's radical pro-war tenure, the right-wing talkers and bloggers convinced themselves they represented the mainstream -- the majority -- of the GOP. But they don't. They represent the radical CPAC wing of the GOP. And it's a shrinking minority.

I just hope the McCain Crazies keep it up. Their unhinged efforts perfectly capture the state of today's conservative movement. For instance, at one point when Limbaugh was ranting against the Arizona senator on his radio show, a caller asked whether he thought McCain would pick Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) as his running mate. Limbaugh sniffed that "Lindsey Graham is certainly close enough to [McCain] to die of anal poisoning."

A Limbaugh pal told the New York Daily News that the host was simply "using a time-honored synonym for 'brown-nosing.' " But as the paper reported, "[I]f you Google the term, the only people who seem to be using it are proprietors of porn sites. "

And then there was Laura Ingraham, the oxymoronic thinking person's right-wing radio host, who became so unnerved at the prospect of a McCain nomination that she suggested that some despondent conservatives would turn themselves into "suicide voters" and cast a ballot for a Democrat in November rather than vote for McCain. (Charles Hurt, the D.C. bureau chief for the New York Post, made the same unhinged analogy.)

Suicide voters and anal poisonings, all in the name of destroying the Republican nominee from within. Hey, GOP, that's quite a Noise Machine you've constructed. Now good luck trying to dismantle it.

Marty Lederman: Lowering the Bar: Well, At Least We're Not as Barbaric as the Spanish Inquisition

2008-02-18T12:30:00.001-08:00

Balkinization: Lowering the Bar: Well, At Least We're Not as Barbaric as the Spanish Inquisition

Has it really come to this?

In my previous post I did not adequately convey just how chilling Steve Bradbury's testimony was today. It began early on: Rep. Nadler asked Bradbury how OLC could possibly have concluded that waterboarding is not torture -- After all, isn't the whole point of the technique to induce severe physical pain and/or suffering so as to compel recalcitrant detainees to talk? Doesn't its reported effectiveness -- most victims cannot withstand more than 30 seconds of it -- speak for itself? Of course it's designed to inflict severe physical suffering. And if it does so, as Bradbury concedes, it's prohibited torture, no matter what the justification might be.

Bradbury did not respond directly to Nadler's question (although later he tipped his hand as to why he has concluded that the CIA waterboarding is not torture -- see below). Instead, Bradbury tried to reassure Nadler, and later Representative Franks, that the CIA's waterboarding was not as bad as press reports would have it -- that our variant of the technique is materially distinct from the sort of water torture used by (i) the Spanish Inquisition; (ii) U.S. forces in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th Century; and (iii) the Japanese in World War II. In those earlier historical examples, there was a "forced consumption of a mass amount of water," and occasionally the interrogators would stand or jump on the stomach of the victim, sometimes leading to "blood coming of the victim's mouth." Which apparently crosses the line. Thankfully, we do not do such terrible things.

Some of you will recognize that the technique Bradbury is disclaiming is the one often called the "water cure." The CIA doesn't use that. Instead, the agency apparently is using the less dangerous version of "waterboarding" -- the sort popularized by the French in Algeria, and by the Khmer Rouge. This technique involves placing a cloth or plastic wrap over or in the person's mouth, and pouring or dripping water onto the person's head. The CIA technique is likely a variant of what Darius Rajali, in his encyclopedic and indispensable new book, calls "Dutch choking" (see pages 281-283) -- either that or, in the cellophane variation, perhaps the "dry submarine" (see 284-285). A couple of years ago, Rejali summarized the various water tortures in an e-mail:

[T]he "water cure" admits of several variants:

(a) pumping: filling a stomach with water causes the organs to distend, a sensation compared often with having your organs set on fire from the inside. This was the Tormenta de Toca favored by the Inquisition and featured on your website photo. The French in Algeria called in the tube or tuyau after the hose they forced into the mouth to fill the organs.

(b) choking - as in sticking a head in a barrel. It is a form of near asphyxiation but it also produces the same burning sensation through all the water a prisoner involuntarily ingests. This is the example illustrated in the Battle of Algiers movie, a technique called the sauccisson or the submarine in Latin America. Prisoners describe their chests swelling to the size of barrels at which point a guard would stomp on the stomach forcing the water to move in the opposite direction.

(c) choking - as in attaching a person to a board and dipping the board into water. This was my understanding of what waterboarding was from the initial reports. The use of a board was stylistically most closely associated with the work of a Nazi political interrogator by the name of Ludwig Ramdor who worked at Ravensbruck camp. Ramdor was tried before the British Military Court Martial at Hamburg (May 1946 to March 1947) on charges for subjecting women to this torture, subjecting another woman to drugs for interrogation, and subjecting a third to starvation and high pressure showers. He was found guilty and executed by the Allies in 1947.

(d) choking - as in forcing someone to lie down, tying them down, then putting a cloth over the mouth, and then choking the prisoner by soaking the cloth. This also forces ingestion of water. It was invented by the Dutch in the East Indies in the 16th century, as a form of torture for English traders. More recently it was common in the American south, especially in police stations, in the 1920s, as documented in the famous Wickersham Report of the American Bar Association (The Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement, 1931), compiling instances of police torture throughout the United States.

CIA officers who have subjected themselves to the CIA version of the technique -- probably (c) or (d), if Bradbury is to believed -- reportedly have lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in. Yet no severe physical pain or suffering?! How can that be?

Bradbury later confirmed (see the video at 36:20-37:00) what I've often speculated here: OLC's view is that a technique is not torture if, "subject to strict safeguards, limitations and conditions, [it] does not involve sever physical pain or severe physical suffering -- and severe physical suffering, we said on our December 2004 Opinion, has to take account of both the intensity of the discomfort or distress involved, and the duration, and something can be quite distressing or comfortable, even frightening, [but] if it doesn't involve severe physical pain, and it doesn't last very long, it may not constitute severe physical suffering. That would be the analysis."

Let's be very clear: This so-called "analysis" is at the very core of the OLC justification for waterboarding, and possibly several other components of the CIA program, as well. And it is flatly, 100% wrong, and indefensible, for reasons I have discussed at length. The fact that Judge Mukasey continues to abide by it is a scandal. And the fact that Congress has not said a word about this legal linchpin of the OLC/CIA regime is even worse.

Waterboarding, even the CIA version, entails excruciating and intense physical suffering. That's why they use it. The account by "Scylla", set out below, describes the effects quite well. His conclusion?: "I'll put it this way. If I had the choice of being waterboarded by a third party or having my fingers smashed one at a time by a sledgehammer, I'd take the fingers, no question. It's horrible, terrible, inhuman torture. I can hardly imagine worse. I'd prefer permanent damage and disability to experiencing it again. I'd give up anything, say anything, do anything."

And yet OLC concludes that this unimaginable physical suffering is not "severe." Why? Because it is so effective at inflicting intense, unparalleled suffering that it does not last very long.

To say that this is not severe physical suffering -- is not torture -- is absurd. And to invoke the defense that what the Spanish Inquisition did was worse, that we use a more benign, non-torture form of waterboarding -- after all, we don't stomp on the victim's chest! -- is obscene. And yet here we have a United States official invoking that justification today, in sworn testimony to Congress, without betraying the slightest hint of self-awareness of how grotesque it is . . . and no one so much as blinked, so inured are we to this discourse by now.

Scylla's description of self-inflicted waterboarding that sounds as if it might be similar to that approved as lawful for use by the CIA:

[T]hose of you who know me will know that I am both enamored of my own toughness and prone to hyperbole. The former, I feel that I am justifiably proud of. The latter may be a truth in many cases, but this is the simple fact:

It took me ten minutes to recover my senses once I tried this. I was shuddering in a corner, convinced I narrowly escaped killing myself.

Here's what happened:

The water fills the hole in the saran wrap so that there is either water or vaccum in your mouth. The water pours into your sinuses and throat. You struggle to expel water periodically by building enough pressure in your lungs. With the saran wrap though each time I expelled water, I was able to draw in less air. Finally the lungs can no longer expel water and you begin to draw it up into your respiratory tract.

It seems that there is a point that is hardwired in us. When we draw water into our respiratory tract to this point we are no longer in control. All hell breaks loose. Instinct tells us we are dying.

I have never been more panicked in my whole life. Once your lungs are empty and collapsed and they start to draw fluid it is simply all over. You [b]know[b] you are dead and it's too late. Involuntary and total panic.

There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. It would be like telling you not to blink while I stuck a hot needle in your eye.

At the time my lungs emptied and I began to draw water, I would have sold my children to escape. There was no choice, or chance, and willpower was not involved.

I never felt anything like it, and this was self-inflicted with a watering can, where I was in total control and never in any danger.

And I understood.

Waterboarding gets you to the point where you draw water up your respiratory tract triggering the drowning reflex. Once that happens, it's all over. No question.

Some may go easy without a rag, some may need a rag, some may need saran wrap.

Once you are there it's all over.

I didn't allow anybody else to try it on me. Inconceivable. I know I only got the barest taste of what it's about since I was in control, and not restrained and controlling the flow of water.

But there's no chance. No chance at all.

So, is it torture?

I'll put it this way. If I had the choice of being waterboarded by a third party or having my fingers smashed one at a time by a sledgehammer, I'd take the fingers, no question.

It's horrible, terrible, inhuman torture. I can hardly imagine worse. I'd prefer permanent damage and disability to experiencing it again. I'd give up anything, say anything, do anything.

The Spanish Inquisition knew this. It was one of their favorite methods.

It's torture. No question. Terrible terrible torture. To experience it and understand it and then do it to another human being is to leave the realm of sanity and humanity forever. No question in my mind.

David Weman Is Shrill!

2008-02-18T12:16:00.001-08:00

He says that Jonathan Rauch is a horrible human being:

Jonathan Rauch is a horrible human being | afoe | A Fistful of Euros | European Opinion: I'll do a rare US-centric post, because this kind of stunned me. Rauch argues that republicans will call a democratic withdrawal from Iraq a stab in the back, and to avoid that Democrats should stretch out withdrawal over several years.

Why that would stop the wingnuts from shouting treason he doesn't bother to explain, but more importantly: The lives or Iraqis or US troops goes unmentioned. The US national interest goes unmentioned. Just avoid contentiousness at all cost. Oh, and if there is any contentiousness it'll be the dirty hippies fault.

Matthew Yglesias Is Shrill!

2008-02-15T11:36:00.001-08:00

It's the idiocy of Mark Penn:

Penn's Bad Spin (Media): Mark Penn's latest memo:

Change Begins March 4th. Hillary leads in the three largest, delegate rich states remaining: Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania. These three states have 492 delegates - 64 percent of the remaining delegates Hillary Clinton needs to win the nomination.

Chris Orr notes that this only works "If Clinton wins all three states by margins of 100-0." Penn doesn't seem to really understand spin. The point of spin is to make the person on whose behalf the spinning is happening look better, not worse. There's no point in just saying any old thing. What's more, it's not really surprising that he's bad at spin -- he's a pollster. Spinning is a distinct skill-set. But for some reason he seems to be doing an awful lot of it, and not very well.

Wingnut Hax of the Gamma Quadrant!

2008-02-12T13:23:00.001-08:00

Remarkable:

Lisa Shiffrin: The Corner on National Review Online: the great political edifice of my era — Reaganism — begat no heirs. Ronald Reagan was sui generis.... [I]n that somewhat removed way of his, while he inspired hundreds of millions around the world, he did not groom any real heirs at home.... [T]he first generation of Reagan revolutionaries, who rose in the House and Senate in the 1980s and early 90s, have pretty much all flamed out.... Ronald Reagan's legacy remains great in a post-Cold War world. But here at home the ideals that he himself never really got to institute — genuinely smaller government that is less involved in our lives, the abolition of certain federal departments, truly low taxes, a reversion to more conservative social norms of family structure — that particular shining city on a hill recedes from vision...

Reagan "never really got to institute" his ideals because they checkmated each other. He was (a) a social conservative who (b) believed in live-and-let-live and letting gay people alone. He was (c) a tax cutter who (d) believed in balancing the budget and (e) having government help everybody (d) except the welfare queens. He believed in (f) confronting the Soviet Union while (g) trusting Gorbachev.

Reagan's only three legacies are:

upward redistribution from middle class to rich
slow economic growth for a decade as the Reagan deficits sapped national saving, and
a brave push toward breaking open and ending the Cold War, as George Shultz, Nancy Reagan, and her astrologer outmaneuvered the wingnut neoconservative Republican machine.

Felix Salmon Is Really Shrill

2008-02-10T15:18:00.001-08:00

It's the Ben Stein watch:

Ben Stein Watch: February 10, 2008 - Finance Blog - Felix Salmon - Market Movers - Portfolio.com: One of the more subtly irritating things about Ben Stein's NYT column is the fact that he seems so cavalier and ungrateful about the fact that he has such an influential pulpit from which to broadcast his biweekly blather. The amount of time and effort he put into this week's column, for instance, was probably less than he expends on trimming his nose hair on a monthly basis. It's an incoherent mess which any self-respecting NYT editor would immediately reject out of hand if it came from anybody else.... This week, Stein's thesis, insofar as he has one, is so obscured by his inarticulacy that it's quite difficult to actually object to anything in the column.

Certainly, the standard Stein touchstones are there: Bob Dylan, "this great nation", "fiduciary entities", derivatives which are "subject to manipulation", "the climate of fear the news media have whipped up", "Anyone? Anyone?".

And there are some easy-to-spot falsehoods and silly exaggerations, too. For one thing, the whole column leans upon the fragile conceit that subprime mortgage lending is usury - which it clearly isn't. Single-digit interest rates can be high, but they can't be usurious. Stein talks about the high yields on bonds backed by subprime mortgages, when in fact the boom was fuelled by the low yields on those bonds.... Note the litany of losers: investment banks are "suffering badly", buy-side institutions are "hurt", but it's shareholders who are "hurt drastically" and who have been "severely limited" in their ability to sue those banks.

Now I thought that the big problem in the US (and world) economy is the credit crunch - the fact that liquidity in debt markets has dried up, with nastly implications for economic growth. But Stein looks at everything from the point of view of a stock-market investor: what's going on in credit markets really doesn't matter unless and until it starts dragging down equities. When the credit markets were in turmoil but the stock markets were doing fine, Stein was perfectly happy. Now that the stock markets have followed the credit markets down, he's mad, and he wants someone, anyone - regulators, judges, he doesn't mind - to ride to his rescue...

If George Bush Will Be Long-Rememebered, Will the Shrillness Ever End?

2008-02-09T23:04:00.001-08:00

George Bush continues his quest to drive every single human being on the planet to shrillness. Since it looks like he will be sending new entrants to Shrillblog for a long, long time, and given the large fraction of people he has already driven over the edge, he may have a chance of reaching his cherished goal:

Interview with Author Philip Roth, Spiegel: …
SPIEGEL: What will remain of the current president, George W. Bush? Could he be forgotten once he leaves office?

Roth: He was too horrendous to be forgotten. There will be an awful lot written about this. And there's a lot to be written about the war. There's a lot to be written about what he did with Reaganism, since he went much further than Reagan. So he won't be forgotten. Someone has said he's the worst American president we've ever had. I think that's true.

SPIEGEL: Why?

Roth: Well, the biggest thing would be the war, the deceptions surrounding the entrance into the war. The absolute cynicism that surrounds the deception. The cost of the war, the Treasury and the lives of the Americans. It's hideous. There is nothing quite like it. The next thing would be the attitude towards global warming, which is a global crisis, and they were utterly indifferent, if not hostile, to any attempt to address it. And so on and so on and so on and so on. So he's done a lot of harm.

SPIEGEL: Since your book is set in that week during the 2004 elections, can you explain why Americans voted for Bush once again?

Roth: I suspect it was the business of being in a war and not wanting to change, and political stupidity. Why does anybody elect anybody? I thought highly of John Kerry when he began, but he couldn't stand up against Bush. The Democrats aren't brutes, which is too bad, because the Republicans are brutes. Brutes win.

Susan Faludi Is Shrill

2008-02-05T15:25:00.001-08:00

In the New York Observer:

Hillary and the Feminine Gaze, Up Close and Personal | The New York Observer: THIRTY WAYS OF LOOKING AT HILLARY: REFLECTIONS BY WOMEN WRITERS. Edited by Susan Morrison: Let's imagine this book's concept%u201430 well-known women writers talk about how they "feel" about Hillary Clinton%u2014applied to 30 male writers and a male presidential candidate. Adjusting for gender, the essay titles would now read: "Barack's Underpants," "Elect Brother Frigidaire," "Mephistopheles for President," "The Road to Codpiece-Gate," and so on. Inside, we would find ruminations on the male candidate's doggy looks and flabby pectorals; musings on such "revealing" traits as the candidate's lack of interest in backyard grilling, industrial arts and pets; and mocking remarks about his lack of popularity with the cool boys on the playground (i.e., the writers and their "friends"). We would hear a great deal of speculation about whether the candidate was really manly or just "faking it." We would hear a great deal about how the candidate made them feel about themselves as men and whether they could see their manhood reflected in the politician's testosterone displays.... And we would hear virtually nothing about the candidate's stand on political issues.

Susan Morrison, the editor of Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary (who's also the articles editor of The New Yorker, and former editor in chief of this newspaper), defends the absence of political analysis in the book thusly: "There's plenty of Hillary Studies literature out there that parses the candidate's stands on policy issues, her Senate votes, and her track record as first lady. This book isn't aiming at that kind of op-ed territory. Rather, it's an attempt to look at the ways in which women think about Hillary (and why they think so much about Hillary), how they make their judgments about her, which buttons she pushes in them and why."

Actually, the op-ed territory is awash with exactly the same sort of trivializing dissection. Hillary Studies pundits are obsessed with the candidate's hairdos, outfits, cookie-baking comments, supposedly "cold" personality and even, most recently, her failure to apply "The Rules" style of dating in her politics. The ratio of trenchant political commentary to personal pot-shotting on the subject of Hillary Clinton in the larger media realm is precisely echoed in the pages of this book, which seems intended to reprise the op-ed fixations, not to bury them. The result is a good deal of convenient psychologizing, self-absorbed meanderings and unearned snipes%u2014and a handful of efforts to take a respectable step back from how-do-I-personally-feel-about-Hillary thumb-suckery.

MANY OF THE writers in Thirty Ways are busy reviewing their own lives and taking their own temperatures, some with notable self-regard. Others are preoccupied with such pressing questions as, is Hillary a dog or cat person? Does she like olive burgers or Boca burgers? If she did have a hobby, what would it be?...

Jonathan Schwarz on the U.N. Deception: What Exactly Colin Powell Knew Five Years Ago, and What He Told the World

2008-02-05T14:57:00.001-08:00

Jonathan Schwarz is shrill:

MotherJones Blog: The U.N. Deception: What Exactly Colin Powell Knew Five Years Ago, and What He Told the World: Colin Powell presented the case against Iraq to the UN Security Council five years ago today, on February 5, 2003.

As much criticism as Powell has received for this%u2014he calls it "painful" and something that will "always be a part of my record"%u2014it hasn't been close to what's justified. Powell was far more than just horribly mistaken: the evidence is conclusive that he fabricated evidence and ignored repeated warnings that what he was saying was false.

Unfortunately, Congress has never investigated Powell's use of the intelligence he was given. Even so, what's already in the public record is extremely damning. So while the corporate media has never taken a close look at this record, anyone can go through Powell's presentation line by line to examine the chasm between what he knew, and what he told the world. As you see below, there's quite a lot to say about it.

Matthew Yglesias Is Shrill!

2008-02-05T11:36:00.001-08:00

He looks at the Washington mainline press corps, and throws up:

Matthew Yglesias: Washington Post: "Shocked, Shocked By Mukasey on Torture": This Washington Post editorial on Michael Mukasey's "tortured testimony" would sit a whole lot better with me if the Post had taken the same line back during Mukasey's confirmation hearings. After all, all this was perfectly clear back then -- asked directly whether he would condemn torture as torture, he declined to do so. So why are we surprised when, as AG, he refuses to do it?

There's some kind of weird sense in which to maintain your respectable Village ID card you need to both resolutely oppose torture and oppose all the political steps that might actually put a stop to it. Instead, you're supposed to have childlike faith that Bush and his henchmen are going to stop it themselves because, after all, they're sweet and wonderful people. Or something.

Kung Fu Monkey Is Hypershrill!

2008-02-01T14:00:00.001-08:00

Kung Fu Monkey: Lunch Discussions #145: The Crazification Factor:

John: ... I mean, what will it take? That last speech literally made no sense. It was crazy drunken bar talk! Islamic radicals are like COMMUNISM?! (gets speech on laptop) If we don't fight terrorists in Iraq they'll build a fundamentalist terrorist state stretching from Spain to Indonesia? What the fuck? Even assuming Spain, which last time I checked is 95% Roman Catholic, goes down, you gotta assume France, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, all eight hundred million Hindus in India, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore would be somewhat of an obstacle.

Tyrone: To be fair, you're going west-to-east. Maybe he meant a fundamentalist terrorist state stretching from Spain to Indonesia going east-to-west. Going that way, there's only the U.S. The President could be warning us that if we don't prevail in Iraq, the United States will become a fundamentalist Islamic terrorist state.

John: ... a little oblique, isn't it?

Tyrone: The man is nothing if not subtle.

John: (calling up map on laptop) You know, I guess if you start in Spain, swing hard south through northern Africa, you got Algeria, Libya there, Egypt, cross the Red Sea and you're in the Middle East ...

Tyrone: From there, if you spot him the Indian Ocean and India, you're in Indonesia.

John: I am not spotting him eight hundred million Hindus. I call shenanigans.

Tyrone: And again, I must point out Bush said "the militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, allowing them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region." That's what the militants believe. They may just be delusional. He says that himself: "Some might be tempted to dismiss these goals as fanatical or extreme. Well, they are fanatical and extreme -- and they should not be dismissed. Our enemy is utterly committed."

John: But he's citing that desire as a basis for our strategy. You can't cite your enemy's delusional hopes as a basis for a rational strategy. Goals don't exist in a vacuum, they're linked to capability. David Koresh was utterly committed to being Jesus Christ. See how far that got him.

Either Bush is making strategy based on a delusional goal of his opponent, which is idiotic; or he's saying he believes his opponent has the capability of achieving this delusional goal, which is idiotic. Neither bodes well for the republic.

Tyrone: Reading here, the speech boiled down to two points --

John: Who cares? The Spain-to-Indonesia thing should automatically invalidate the whole speech. I don't care how good your investment advisor is, he can spend three hours reviewing mutual funds, as soon as he says "And of course, we can put your money into the Easter Bunny's Egg Upgrades", he is out of --

Tyrone: -- two points. First, Iraq is the keystone in the struggle between the West and Islamic Fundamentalism.

John: Which, if we accept the Administration's own argument, means that invading and destabilizing Iraq with insufficent post-war planning (and all that entails), not enough personnel, and shitty equipment for that personnel was the biggest screw-up in the War on Terror.

Tyrone: He's the President: if he says it, it must be true. Second, Bush says we have made a lot of progress in stopping al-Queda plots. Look: "Overall, the United States and our partners have disrupted at least ten serious al Qaeda terrorist plots since September the 11th, including three al Qaeda plots to attack inside the United States. We've stopped at least five more al-Qaeda efforts to case targets in the United States, or infiltrate operatives into our country."

John: What are they counting for those wins? Are they counting guys like Padilla?* This is all very gooey, like how we've killed like, nine of Osama Bin Laden's #3 guys.

Tyrone: Being #3 in Al-queda is like being a "creative vice president" at a Hollywood studio. There are dozens of them ... and they are expendable. Listen, don't do this, you're just getting worked up. Have another mozzarella stick.

John: Hey, Bush is now at 37% approval. I feel much less like Kevin McCarthy screaming in traffic. But I wonder what his base is --

Tyrone: 27%.

John: ... you said that immmediately, and with some authority.

Tyrone: Obama vs. Alan Keyes. Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That's crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.

John: Objectively crazy or crazy vis-a-vis my own inertial reference frame for rational behaviour? I mean, are you creating the Theory of Special Crazification or General Crazification?

Tyrone: Hadn't thought about it. Let's split the difference. Half just have worldviews which lead them to disagree with what you consider rationality even though they arrive at their positions through rational means, and the other half are the core of the Crazification -- either genuinely crazy; or so woefully misinformed about how the world works, the bases for their decision making is so flawed they may as well be crazy.

John: You realize this leads to there being over 30 million crazy people in the US?

Tyrone: Does that seem wrong?

John: ... a bit low, actually.

Tyrone: (shrugs) Probably right, then. Speaking of Obama, I need to get t-shirts printed up to sell.

John: I can do that on the web. What do they say?

Tyrone: Don't You Dare Kill Obama

John: How about Don't You Dare Kill Obama (... and we know you're thinking about it)

Tyrone: Niiiiice.

John: Or You Kill Obama and WE WILL BURN SHIT DOWN

Tyrone: Even better. Nobody wants their shit burned down.

John: Glad to help.

Tyrone: I'm having you taken off the list for when the revolution comes.

John: ... there's really a list --

Tyrone: Oh yeah. Hell yeah.

James Wolcot Is Shrill

2008-01-30T17:34:00.001-08:00

It's Jacob Weisberg and Doris Kearns Goodwin wot done it:

James Wolcott's Blog: At Some Point You're Too Old to Clap for Tinker Bell: Wolcott's Blog: vanityfair.com: "Jacob Weisberg is a nitwit"--that's some pretty salty language coming from TBogg, but a man can only take so much Stovetop Stuffing of faux naivete before he gets fed up. I watched a large chunk of the Charlie Rose post-SOTU all-star cud-chew last night during which Weisberg expressed mild surprise that Bush hadn't sounded "more conciliatory" in his final address. I was surprised that Weisberg was surprised, expressing my surprise by muttering aloud just soft enough so the cats wouldn't hear, "Diphead, what did you expect? That he would make nice now having gotten his way through arrogance and imperious piety ever since 9/11? He makes cracking down on earmarks a show of manhood, and you think he's going to introduce softer colors into his palette and fluffier textures as he struts out the door into History's sunlit parlor? Have you no psychological acumen whatsoever, man?" Well, it was late and I had had a lot of soda. And I confess that even Weisberg wasn't nearly as annoying as fellow panelist Doris Kearns Goodwin, who has become a major irritant with her girlish enthusiasm and goody bag of presidential anecdotes that she dispenses to humanize everybody on the same glorious continuum, as if the crimes and calamities of Vietnam and Iraq were crucibles of character-building for our chief executives, the crowded backdrops to personal tragedy and greatness. (So many faraway nobodies have to die so that History can come alive.) She won't let up about having visited the North Vietnam prison where John McCain was held, captivated by a heroic narrative that seems to make her giddy at the prospect of his becoming president and fulfilling a destiny that'll make a helluva book someday. Mind you, I'm rooting for McCain on the Republican side, if only to enjoy the spumes of rabid froth his nomination would produce from Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and the hostiles at NRO's Corner. Fun is where you find it.

Duncan Black Is Shrill!

2008-01-24T12:53:00.001-08:00

The Eschaton writes:

Eschaton: Delegate Strategy: It's amazing the degree to which the actual mechanics of winning the primary contests are ignored in favor of how various outcomes impact press narratives that the press is somehow powerless to control...

Matthew Yglesias is shrill too:

Matthew Yglesias A Small Point (Media): This morning, Mitt Romney had more delegates than John McCain. Following today's primaries, Romney's lead has grown even larger because Nevada has more delegates than South Carolina and Romney won a larger proportion of the vote in NV than McCain got in South Carolina. Naturally, the press is declaring this a big win for McCain. I just saw Howard Fineman explain that "there is no longer any strong candidate in the race" to oppose McCain. Nobody but the guy who's leading, that is.

I feel Hugh Hewitt's pain.

And Duncan Black points out that our journalists cannot even cover a horse race:

Eschaton: So Super: For all the obsession of with the horserace, it's been surprisingly focused on the Horse Race Right Now Based On Prevailing Press Narratives, instead of actually talking about stuff which might actually be a bit more interesting. Obviously Super Tuesday matters for candidates who are trying to collect delegates, otherwise known as candidates not named Giuliani. I assume the various campaigns have strategies for which states they intend to focus on, try to win, etc., but I've heard basically nothing about it.

And Matthew Yglesias watches Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post demonstrate the will to stupidity:

Matthew Yglesias: Heads Romney Wins, Tails Romney Also Wins (Politics): Romney's already leading in delegates, and since he's going to pick up even more in Nevada that will further strengthen his position. The fact that The Washington Post can make reference to Romney having a "delegate strategy" strikes me as telling. At the end of the day, you need delegates to win. A strategy to win delegates seems like a smart strategy...

Aren't all strategies--all strategies that might win, that is--delegate strategies?

Blind Sputtering Fury

2008-01-18T20:10:00.001-08:00

Hilzoy is appalled by Norman Podhoretz, advisor to the Giuliani campaign and an advocate of the war:

Obsidian Wings: In Which I Am Reduced To Blind Sputtering Fury, by Hilzoy: Via TAPPED, an absolutely astonishing quote from Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic:

"Just before the “Mission Accomplished” phase of the war, I spoke about Kurdistan to an audience that included Norman Podhoretz, the vicariously martial neoconservative who is now a Middle East adviser to Rudolph Giuliani. After the event, Podhoretz seemed authentically bewildered. “What’s a Kurd, anyway?” he asked me."*

I am trying to come up with an analogy that will do justice to this. The best I can think of is: imagine that some country conquered the USA in 1870, that that country's plans for us depended on the USA remaining one unified country, and that it emerged that a major advocate of the invasion did not know, while he was urging the country to go to war, what a "Confederate" was. It's exactly that appalling.

Moreover, think of all the other things Podhoretz must not have known if he didn't know what a Kurd was. He must not have known what the major fault lines in Iraqi society are. He must not have known much about the Anfal campaign: maybe he knew that Saddam had gassed people, but he could not have known why. He could not possibly have been following the first Gulf War very closely, since it's hard to imagine how he could have done so without hearing about our protection of the Kurds in Northern Iraq. Likewise, he could not have known why the northern no-fly zone was necessary. …

Actually, it's not even worth enumerating all the particular things someone must not have known if he didn't know what a Kurd was. There are certain things you just pick up if you follow an issue, or a country, at all. If you follow Iraq at all, you cannot possibly not know what a Kurd is. So forget my earlier analogy about hypothetical invasions of America in 1870: what Podhoretz said is like one of the accountants who certified Enron's books asking: "what's a balance sheet?", or someone who trumpeted the safety of the Titanic asking: "what's a hull?"
***

Norman Podhoretz advocated invasion, and he did so not just as a random citizen in some dingy bar somewhere, but as someone who had considerable influence over policy-makers in Washington. … And apparently, he did so at a time when he had not bothered to find out who the Kurds were.

No one with any intellectual integrity would sign off on Enron's books without figuring out what a balance sheet was, or advise people that the Titanic was safe if he didn't know which of those thingies on a ship was the hull. Likewise, no one with any intellectual integrity would advise a President to go to war when he knew so little about the country he proposed that we invade that he had to ask "What is a Kurd, anyway?" Moreover, no one with anything resembling a conscience would urge that we send our soldiers off to fight and die, or that we unleash on one country, let alone "five or six or seven," the death and immiseration that war always brings, unless he had satisfied himself that invading that country was in fact necessary, and that that war would be worth the price that others would pay. Norman Podhoretz was willing to urge the sacrifice of other people's lives without, apparently, bothering to learn the most basic facts about what he was talking about. You do the math.

Now he's advising Rudy Giuliani's campaign, and telling President Bush to bomb Iran. I wish I had some confidence that he has bothered to figure out who the Shi'a are, but I don't see any reason whatsoever why I should.
***

*Footnote: I am, of course, relying on Goldberg's account of his exchange with Podhoretz. Goldberg has generally struck me as reliable. Podhoretz, not so much. … Not a person on whose sanity and intellectual integrity I'd want to put a lot of weight. Just one more difference between me and George W. Bush, apparently.

Duncan Black Is Shrill!

2008-01-16T20:55:00.001-08:00

It's Jim Cramer's fault:

Eschaton: Buy Buy Countrywide: Jim Cramer told you to buy at $44. Countrywide will cease to exist... at $7.16.

Virginia Postrel's Allergic Reaction to Ron Paul

2008-01-16T20:52:00.001-08:00

Virginia Postrel is shrill:

Dynamist Blog: Libertarians Fall Off Turnip Truck: Thanks to The New Republic, libertarians who weren't paying attention in the 1990s, don't read Texas Monthly, and didn't do their candidate research have now discovered that Ron Paul said--or, more likely, allowed to be said in his name (probably by Lew Rockwell)--nasty things in his newsletters. Much reaction can be found at Hit & Run, as well as Andrew Sullivan's blog and The Volokh Conspiracy. The disclosures are not news to me, nor is the Paul campaign's dismissive reaction a surprise. When you give your political heart to a guy who spends so much time worrying about international bankers, you're not going to get a tolerant cosmopolitan.

New York Times Death Spiral Watch

2008-01-16T20:49:00.001-08:00

Ezra Klein has, as usual, some very smart things to say:

EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect: Read James Fallows on the breathtaking banality of William Kristol's writing. Sadly, this was entirely predictable. Kristol, whatever his talents, is not known for writing, well, anything. He occasionally pens an editor's note in the beginning of The Weekly Standard. He occasionally writes a hilariously wrong op-ed in The Washington Post. He sent most of this year underperforming in a regular column at Time, from which he was eventually dropped. This is what I was getting at in my post asking which conservative you would have elevated to the op-ed page. You guys suggested a variety of smart picks: Ramesh Ponnuru, Ross Douthat, Rich Brookhiser, Tyler Cowen, Bruce Bartlett, Radley Balko, and a handful more. I'd add to that list Nick Gillespie, James Manzi, Brink Lindsey, John Miller, Daniel Drezner, Damon Linker, Christopher Preble, etc, etc.

What's offensive, to me, isn't even the spectacle of the The New York Times exhibiting such insecurity that they need to hire a flagrantly wrong, technically untalented, and ideologically ugly writer for their op-ed page -- it's being so unimaginative, so contemptuous of the best-world worth of conservatism, as to pick Kristol. I would like to read more smart, interesting, conservatives. If the Times is going to insist on packing that spot with a conservative, rather than an actual leftist (which, let's be clear, they don't have), I would like a thought-provoking conservative. But Kristol was merely the nearest right-winger at hand with enough conservative fame to act as an instant shield in conversations about the Times' ideological leanings. They picked him for cover, rather than for their reader's edification, and in doing, they served us very poorly.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Hilzoy on the Party of Moral Values and Limited Government

2008-01-13T17:24:00.001-08:00

Hilzoy is shrill:

Obsidian Wings: "One Of Us": I just couldn't let this delightful comment by Kathryn Lopez at NRO pass unremarked. She's talking about John McCain:

I’m second to none in praising him on his surge leadership. But on a whole host of issues — including water boarding, tax cuts, and the freedom of speech — he’s not one of us."

Like von, I favor Obama among the Democrats, and McCain among the Republicans. And one of the reasons for that is that, leaving aside the odious Ron Paul, while all the Republican candidates seem to be in favor of prolonging the war in Iraq indefinitely, McCain is the only one who is not "one of us" on waterboarding. He hasn't come out against torture nearly as much as I would like, nor has he been a champion of civil liberties, but at least he seems to recognize that there's a problem there, which is more than I can say for the rest of them.

The Kool Kidz in the Republican Party might think that support for torture is a prerequisite for entry into their little club. That just shows how far the supposed party of moral values and limited government has fallen.

Spencer Ackerman Is Shrill!

2008-01-12T18:09:00.001-08:00

It's the Bushies, again:

toohotfortnr: Instead of moving that, nope, you need to re-up: Awesome new co-worker Colin Soloway and I were talking about this at the office yesterday. This Baghdad neighborhood that the U.S. has been bombing? That's Arab Jabour, a place cited by General Petraeus and the White House as a surge success story. Luckily, Jamie Gumbrecht and Nancy Youssef of McClatchy are on top of it:

The targets were near the town of Arab Jabour, a Sunni Muslim-dominated district on Baghdad's outskirts that American officials recently held up as a security success and an example of how local Sunni tribesmen known as "concerned local citizens" had turned against al Qaida in Iraq.

But Thursday's air attack indicated that the area still has a considerable Sunni militant presence. The statement said that more than 40 targets in three large areas were hit during two passes by two supersonic B-1 bombers and four F-16 fighter jets. A U.S. military official in the area said the targets were al Qaida in Iraq weapons caches and bomb-making materials.

The blitz dropped 38 bombs in its first 10 minutes, the statement said.

Forty thousand pounds of bombs. It's counterinsurgency-rific! And goddamn it, why can't Gumbrecht and Youssef acknowledge that the surge succeeded????//

John Scalzi Is Shrill!

2008-01-12T14:26:00.001-08:00

Your standard neolibertarian Heinlein-worshipping science-fiction author says:

Your Big Fat Election Brain Dump, 1/11/08: In a matchup, I’ll take any of the top Democratic contenders over any of the top Republican contenders, because aside from the fact that there are no Republican candidates who I have any interest in voting for (I find McCain the most congenial to me philosophically and the only one who, should he win, won’t have me looking somewhat wistfully at the New Zealand immigration site to see if I have enough points to qualify), there’s also the simple fact that no Republican administration is going to be as motivated as a Democratic one to stop doing all the fucktarded things the Bush Administration has done over the course of the last seven years. Sorry, guys, the dude has trashed your brand.

I’m not going to go so far as to say that if the Democrats nominated a circus bear I’d vote for it over any GOP candidate, although I probably would vote for a circus bear over, say, Huckabee, because the bear would almost certainly know more about foreign affairs. But Clinton or Obama (or even Edwards, although I suspect he’s already toast and just hanging about to be kingmaker)? Really, not a problem.

Well, if I were going to vote for one of the Democratic candidates, which would I vote for? Honestly, I have no clue.... I’m happy to have the two of them debate each other and give everyone a good look at their positions and such. Emotionally, Obama appeals to me... to be blunt about it, having a President Obama would make it feel like the American people were doing a Ctrl+Alt+Delete on the previous eight years, and there’s a lot of appeal to that. But Clinton’s selling point — she’s already got the presidential apparatus ready to go — is not insignificant either.... People who loathe the Clintons, singly and severally, like to... cling to the shibboleth that her negatives are so high... and thus: President McCain (in a best-case scenario). I think these people are kind of high. Hello, McFly: This is a Clinton we’re talking about. You can’t kill them, they just keep coming.... Ask yourself, Clinton loathers: if in some alternate universe 2000 had been between Dubya and Clinton (either Clinton, they come as a package deal), do you think the Clintonistas would have tolerated the Florida vote count shenanigans? Does anyone really believe that Bush would have walked out of that the winner? One of the things I’ve always said about the 2000 election is that ultimately Bush won it because the Republicans were willing to snorkle through pig shit to get it, while the Democrats, and specifically Al Gore and his people, didn’t want to get their precious widdle hands mussed. When it came down to it, Gore didn’t want it enough. “Not wanting it enough” is not going to be a problem for Clinton.

For all the people who seem to believe that Clintons are universally loathed simply for being Clintons, it’s worth remembering that for the entirety of Bill Clinton’s second term (you know, the one he was impeached in), his approval rating never dropped below 54% (according to Gallup); as a contrast, the last time Bush saw an approval rating higher than that was the first couple of weeks of his second term.... [W]hen it comes right down to wallowing in the pig shit and going after your opponent with a splintery baseball bat, no one does it better than the Clintons, and the GOP is out of practice dealing with an opponent who not only hits back but is out to break your fucking skull....

That said, I think it’s entirely possible we’ll end up with Obama as the Democratic candidate, in which case the GOP had better hope smearing still works, because that’s all they’re going to have on the dude....

Also, the GOP field? Monkeys. Or more accurately: Jesus Monkey, 9/11 Monkey, flip-flop Monkey with perfect hair, Monkey who wins teh Internets and fails everything else, and John McCain, who is not a monkey, but who is two years shy of how old Ronald Reagan was at the end of his second term, which is worrying. I want John McCain to tell us right now who his VP choice is going to be, because I have a sneaking suspicion that knowledge is going to be relevant... and if he picks a monkey of the same quality as the rest of the GOP field, it’s back to perusing the New Zealand immigration Web site again.

But aside from McCain, seriously, y’all, what the hell? Is this field really the best you can do? Don’t get me wrong, Huckabee’s Chuck Norris ad gave me a giggle, and I think it’s nice that Ron Paul gives the “I read Atlas Shrugged every year and it gets better every time” crowd something to do through the chilly winter nights. But this is no way to run a railroad. I sincerely do hope McCain takes the nomination, because although I disagree with him substantively on a number of policy points, at least saying “President McCain” doesn’t make me want to vomit in my mouth a little, the way “President Romney” or “President Guliani” does (saying “President Huckabee” doesn’t make me want to vomit, but does make me want to sigh heavily and shake my head sadly). I can live with a President McCain. But I’m sorry for you Republicans you don’t have a better set of candidates to choose from.

Self-Shrillness from John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei

2008-01-10T21:42:00.001-08:00

Robert Waldmann informs us that the fecklessness, incompetence, laziness, ignorance, and corruption of Washington political reporters like John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei has driven John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei into raving shrill unholy madness.

It is a spectacle. It is not often that you see people publicly confess that they are frauds hoping to be taken for fools:

Why reporters get it wrong - John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei - Politico.com: New Hampshire sealed it. The winner was Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the loser — not just of Tuesday's primary but of the 2008 campaign cycle so far — was us. "Us" is the community of reporters, pundits and prognosticators who so confidently — and so rashly — stake our reputations on the illusion that we understand politics and have special insight that allows us to predict the behavior of voters.

If journalists were candidates, there would be insurmountable pressure for us to leave the race. If the court of public opinion were a real court, the best a defense lawyer could do is plea bargain out of a charge that reporters are frauds in exchange for a signed confession that reporters are fools. New Hampshire was jarring because it offered in highly concentrated form all the dysfunctions and maladies that have periodically afflicted political journalism for years.

Let’s look back at some of the bogus narratives of this election so far. There was the “John McCain is dead” story line from last summer.... Then there was Iowa... we wrote... all about organization. Except they were won on the Republican side by Mike Huckabee, who had only the barest-bones organization.... Or Barack Obama. The reason his candidacy was not taking flight, as the wisdom had it last fall, was that he was preaching a bland message of unity and civility in a year when Democrats were eager for a sharper, more confrontational and more partisan message. Guess not.

These were only appetizers to the main course of humiliation. After a barrage of coverage that all but anointed Obama as the New Hampshire winner... that exercise in groupthink was stopped cold by the actual votes. Whoops.

Looks like we have a trend here. Our own publication, Politico, did its part in promoting several of these flimsy story lines. We used predictive language in stories. We amplified certain trends and muffled the caveat.... When we started Politico, we vowed to be more transparent than news organizations traditionally have been about how we do our work — and how we sometimes err. In that spirit, here are some thoughts about why this profession, supposedly devoted to depicting reality, obsesses about so many story lines that turn out to be fiction.

1. Horse race frenzy: We are addicts. Do not listen to any reporter who says otherwise. It is why reporters leave their homes, spouses and families for long stretches to cram into crummy hotels and smelly buses to cover campaigns. The Web has made us a bit less defensive about this than we were in the past. That’s because we now have metrics — based on what stories get clicked on — that show our readers are obsessed with the horse race, too....

2. The echo chamber: Check out the nicer restaurants in Manchester, N.H., or Des Moines, Iowa, in the political season and you will see the same group of journalists and pols dining together almost every night. We go to events together, make travel plans together and read each other's work compulsively. We go to the same websites — the Drudge Report, Real Clear Politics, Time’s “The Page” — to see what each other is writing, and it’s only human nature to respond to it. That is one chief reason the “Hillary is inevitable” and “Hillary is toast” narratives developed so quickly and spread so rapidly.... There is a defense of sorts here, too. Even Clinton aides themselves started the day believing they were going to get blown out. But just because well-placed people are in the echo chamber does not mean the noise is accurate.

3. Personal bias: This one is complicated. Most reporters, in our experience, really do work hard to separate their personal feelings from their professional judgment.... Reporters are human, and some did seem swept up in the same emotions many voters experienced when they saw a black man win snow-white Iowa by preaching a gospel of change.... McCain also benefits from the personal sentiments of reporters. Many journalists are enamored with McCain because of the access he gives and, above all, the belief that he is free of political artifice.

Hillary Clinton, cautious and scripted, got the reverse treatment. She is carrying the burden of 16 years of contentious relations between the Clintons and the news media. Many journalists rushed with unseemly haste to the narrative about the fall of the Clinton machine....

Things are not all bad. Politico is part of a broad, technology-inspired movement that has led to more open and more exhaustive coverage of this presidential race than ever before. A lot of that coverage is damn good. As far as what’s bad, there is generally one good answer to excesses and hype in political journalism: Respect the voters. That means waiting to find out what they really think.

Stupidest Man Alive Nomination

2008-01-04T20:54:00.001-08:00

John Podheretz: >Commentary » Blog Archive » IOWA: A Very Cheerful Rudy Giuliani: On MSNBC, Rudy Giuliani is making a very smiley, happy showing of himself. The result in Iowa could not have been better for Giuliani tactically. Romney has been injured. Huckabee won, but did not apparently win by a huge margin, and there won’t be many other states where evangelicals make up fully three-fifths of the primary electorate. And John McCain did not, it seems, come in third with a surprising showing, but fourth with a very modest showing. If McCain beats Romney in New Hampshire, Romney will have a difficult time going on — but McCain clearly hasn’t yet turned the corner and brought conservative Republicans back in his corner. And Fred Thompson’s third-place showing wasn’t impressive enough to kick his campaign back to life. With no one especially strong on the Republican side through the first few states, the Giuliani strategy of betting it all on Florida on January 29 and the big states on February 5 is looking better than it did a week ago.

TBogg Reads National Review So We Don't Have to

2008-01-04T15:25:00.001-08:00

From TBogg:

TBogg - “…a somewhat popular blogger”: All Jesus deliveries to the back door please... By: TBogg Friday January 4, 2008 12:37 pm Over at The Corner they are indulging in some soul searching (as of this writing, no soul has yet been located) over what it means to their party when when the snake-handling yokels that they have been stringing along for all of these years, finally show up and the front door and want to marry their sister.

And here are the highlights:

The Corner on National Review Online: Re: Now for Something Completely Different [Rich Lowry]: Something has been bothering me about my friend's comments I posted earlier. The thing about Huck rejecting "Rovian" politics. That might be true in some symbolic sense, but if we take Rovian politics as it is conventionally defined as massively turning out the base and using negative, personal wedges against an opponent, Huckabee did both. He blew out the Romney turn-out model the way Bush did Kerry's in 2004 because evangelicals showed up in an off-the-charts turnout. As for the negative stuff, he never went up on the air, but he (subtly) used the religion card against Romney and frankly used the class card. He did the latter at basically every campaign stop. So if this is the new politics, it's going to come with a subtly nasty undercurrent.

Question [Kathryn Jean Lopez]: David Brooks writes: "[Huckabee] sensed that conservatives do not believe their own movement is well led. He took on Rush Limbaugh, the Club for Growth and even President Bush." Even? Is there any movement conservative who ever confused President Bush with a/the leader of the conservative movement? A conservative choice. More conservative than other viables. But movement guy?

Re: Exit Polls [Ramesh Ponnuru]: Like Mark Hemingway’s correspondent, I think a lot of the commentary about the Republican results in Iowa is beside the point. As he says, what jumps out at you from the exit polls is that Huckabee crushed Romney among evangelicals and Romney crushed Huckabee among everyone else. These numbers powerfully suggest that Romney couldn’t really have done better in Iowa. His strategy was premised on there not being a candidate who could unite evangelicals the way Huckabee did. Being more “genuine,” or doing more to appeal to people making less than $50,000, wouldn’t have helped. Yes, as David Brooks implies in his column today, Romney had more appeal to people higher up the income scale. But religion made a bigger difference; and if evangelical voters in Iowa tend to have lower incomes than other Republicans, then the income divide in the party could be partly illusory. If Huckabee’s rise makes Republicans revamp their agenda to appeal to working-class voters, they will be doing a smart thing for a dumb reason. So could Romney have followed a strategy that relied less on Iowa? It’s hard to see how, if he was going to run as a conservative alternative to McCain and Giuliani. John Ellis is a smart political observer who argues, as many others do, that Romney should have run as a candidate of “new ideas” rather than a “700 Club” Republican. Well, first off, these things aren’t mutually exclusive (or Republicans would be not just in bad but hopeless shape). But second, there was no way that a pro-choice Mitt Romney could have beaten Rudy Giuliani in the primaries. And once he flipped on that issue, all of the attacks on him as plastic, etc., were baked in the cake.

Resurrecting Fred [Kathryn Jean Lopez]: I still contend people shouldn't get too excitable about last night. But I also imagine — especially with all the excitablility — that I can't be the only one wondering if Fred Thompson might just be handed a window before this is all over? Actually, I know I'm not. I'm getting pro-Fred mail like I haven't seen since people were enthusiastically wanting to draft him back almost a year or less ago. I think conservatives much rather give Thompson the possibility of a second look than McCain.

Rudy Time [Mark R. Levin]: The biggest beneficiary of the Huckabee win in Iowa is not Huckabee, it's Rudy. The biggest beneficiary of a McCain win in New Hampshire would be Rudy. Romney's strategy was to win Iowa and New Hampshire. He has now lost Iowa. Rudy is waiting to pounce in the next tier of states. That has always been his strategy.

Relax. [Mark R. Levin]: Huckabee will not be the Republican nominee.

Isn't Anyone Reading Exit Polls? [Mark Hemingway]: Or so asks a reader: "Huckabee took 14% of the vote and came in fourth in the Iowa caucus among non-evangelicals according to the NBC Republican exit poll [other polls come out about the same]. Huckabee's principle voting block was female born-again Christian Republicans living in non-urban rural areas with a population below 10,000. I dearly love such people, but demographically in the country at large there aren't that many of them." When Huckabee moves out of caucus Iowa and into primary state America, he's going to get killed.

Huck Rides a Donkey [Mark Hemingway]: Arkansas political columnist David J. Sanders, who has written about Huckabee for NRO here and here, has a good piece in the WSJ arguing that Huck is more religious left than religious right.

Dog-Eat-Dog [Stephen Spruiell]: I watched the Iowa Democratic caucuses on C-SPAN last night, and so I must rant about the stupidity of the process: 400 Iowa Democrats wandering around a high-school cafeteria, harassing each other for two hours by repeating the same worn-out lines we've heard a million times before about each candidate...

Now, Kill the Iowa Caucus [Jonah Goldberg]: We now have a brief window of opportunity to drive a stake through the heart of the Iowa Caucus. Or so I argue in my column today.

Quick Question [Jonah Goldberg]: Hey does anyone know if one can smoke cigars indoors in the "Live Free or Die" state?

Reagan, Iowa, 1980 [James S. Robbins]: K, lest we forget, Ronald Reagan's 1980 Iowa loss set up a timeless Ronnie moment. Bush Sr. came out of his 1980 Iowa victory with self-described "Big Mo." Reagan challenged him to a debate, which the Nashua Telegraph agreed to sponsor. But due to election law intricacies, Reagan chose to pay for it himself. When all the candidates turned up for what the Bush team thought was going to be a two-man debate, chaos erupted, and Reagan tried to explain the circumstances. The editor of the Nashua Telegraph ordered the sound man to turn off Reagan's microphone, leading to the timeless moment when Reagan forcefully stated "I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!" He then took 51% in New Hampshire in a seven way race.

Huckabee, Candidate of the Elites? [Mike Potemra]: I was talking tonight to a veteran of the Republican Governors Association in Washington, D.C. This seasoned political operative told me that if you asked the staffers there back when both Huckabee and Romney were governors, the staffers would have strongly preferred Huckabee. The conventional wisdom, of course, is that Huckabee is the populist candidate backed by ignorant yahoos while Romney is the elitist candidate backed by effete, impudent snobs. Now, the Huckabee (and Obama) moment probably won't last, and the heavy-hitter front-runners will probably end up being nominated, but this insight from a D.C. politics-watcher reassures me that Huckabee can appeal even to the all-important "insider" vote . . . . (For what it's worth, the political guy I'm quoting is a McCain backer.)

The Tale of the GOP Caucuses [Rich Lowry]: Here's one way to look at it: 60% of voters were evangelicals. Huck beat Romney among them 45-19%. 40% weren't evangelicals. Romney beat Huck among them 33-13%.

The Romney Response [Kathryn Jean Lopez]: A Romney circler emphasizes to me in the virtual spin room: "Huckabee is a pro-life Jimmy Carter – he will be rejected by econ and natl security conservatives.He would be the death knell of the social conservatives as players within the party – hopefully enough will come to their senses." For them it is about that Reagan coalition. The one Rollins says is dead and thus is determined to destroy. But I'm sensing some nervous optimism that this can be remedied for them. We'll have more of a sense on Tuesday.

The McCain Fallout [Ramesh Ponnuru]: Almost entirely good, I should think. Romney is taken down several pegs. McCain's failure to get third won't matter: The press set him up so he could win but couldn't lose. The Democratic results will be the bigger headline, though, and they might hurt McCain if they draw New Hampshire independents to vote in the Democratic primary rather than the Republican one. It's good news for Giuliani, too, since it increases the likelihood of a split result in the first states and thus gives him the time he needs to get to Florida.

Bill Schneider and Others [Kathryn Jean Lopez]: are pointing out the high percentage of evangelical voters who have reportedly turned out. Anti-Huck people are freaking. Deep breaths. As Bill Bennett just pointed out on CNN, evangelicals aren't necessarily a voting block, as much as Pastor Huckabee has tried to suggest (and prays?) they are in his identity-politicking. Just ask Mark DeMoss...

Steve Suh is Shrill!!

2008-01-04T10:05:00.001-08:00

He writes:

Cogitamus: Broder's Wisdom For Today: Via Atrios, we see that Iowa is stupid and yucky and has cooties:

When you're reading the returns from the Iowa caucuses, you are viewing them through a double distortion mirror.

The outcome of Iowa's first-in-the-nation voting is skewed by two big factors. The turnout is ridiculously small, barely 20 percent of the eligible voters. And those who choose to caucus are hardly representative of the population as a whole.

But New Hampshire, well, that state is well-behaved and bathes regularly:

The Democratic Party of New Hampshire is a balanced blend of college-trained, high-tech people and educators, with a leavening of retirees and a significant ethnic, urban contingent in Manchester and Nashua, as well. The Republican Party here is a small-business and professional class, with some blue-collar elements and a spillover of former Massachusetts residents living along the southern border.

New Hampshirites are indeed a fair folk, industrious, honest and plain-spoken. They live in picturesque hamlets deep in the forest and while away the winter hours listening to the village elders tell stories of their ancestors.

Iowans have been known to go to moving picture shows and, it is rumored, use devious means to turn their grain products into strong beverages.

Besides being yet another installment of Centrism and Civility: The Path to Progress, the real purpose of Broder's column is to give everyone the basis they need to dismiss Iowa's results when Huckabee and Edwards win. Until this column I, despite my predictions, wasn't really sure if Edwards in particular could pull it off, but Broder seems convinced.

They Look at Rows of Numbers!!!

2008-01-02T23:37:00.001-08:00

Perhaps not absolutley shrill, but relatively so:

Economists View: "Not Remotely the Same as Good at Getting it Right": Why oh why do I read anything at the NRO and, if I do, why do I ever bother with Jerry Bowyer? He says:

Gas Bags, by Jerry Bowyer, NRO: ...Gas-price hikes will never, ever, ever cut into consumer spending. It’s a mathematical impossibility. Here’s why: Gas prices are a component of consumer spending.

You see, when gas prices climb from $2 a gallon to $3 a gallon, one of the components of retail spending goes up. ...

Sure, if people spend more money on gas, they may very well spend less on soft drinks. But that’s a substitution, not a decrease in overall spending. The spending simply shifts from one retail category to another.

So why don’t we ever hear this? Well, with a few notable exceptions, mainstream TV commentators don’t know the facts, which often are buried in the details. You can’t just read a financial press release from a government organization (or worse yet, the blurb about the press release) and understand what the data are saying. A Larry Kudlow, a Steve Forbes, a Dan Yergin, a John Rutledge, an Art Laffer, a Brian Wesbury — these folks actually read the reports, including the tables in the back. They look at rows of numbers; in the case of a consumer-spending report, they note the row that is devoted to gas stations.

Meanwhile, the ... only numbers they master are the phone numbers of their favorite producers. Good at getting on the air is not remotely the same as good at getting it right.

He is arguing that input costs don't matter, but of course that's wrong. It's just not true that "Gas-price hikes will never, ever, ever cut into consumer spending," see the 1970s for one counterexample. Or do a simple thought experiment. If the price of oil went up to, say, $1,000 a barrel tomorrow, would real GDP stay at its current level, or might you expect a decline in GDP, in the short-run at least? And if GDP falls, then consumer spending will fall along with it.

Maybe the problem is that the people he so admires are simply looking at tables of numbers rather than doing actual econometric investigations solidly grounded in economic theory, something that involves more than, say, two lines drawn on a graph (see the completely uninformative graph he has plotted in this article for his latest along these lines - that graph tells us nothing whatsoever, but Bowyer appears to place great stock in the relationship between the two variables over the last 11 months - it's almost comical to see the graph put forward as serious analysis). Seriously, try doing actual econometric analysis instead of looking at "rows of numbers; in the case of a consumer-spending report, ... the row that is devoted to gas stations." Even when you try to get sophisticated and compare two rows at once, that isn't adequate (hey, both are going up!). Doing so leads to false conclusions like tax cuts pay for themselves because you haven't bothered to consider factors like trend growth in tax receipts (to name just one omitted variable in the typical "analysis").

Anyway, Bowyer - who isn't an economist but plays one at the NRO - should realize that "good at getting an article at the NRO is not remotely the same as good at getting it right," something he has shown time and again.

D-squared Digest Is Shriller than Ever!

2007-12-28T11:44:00.001-08:00

It's a very nice Christmas present from Daniel Davies:

D-squared Digest -- FOR bigger pies and shorter hours and AGAINST more or less everything else: Is Tom Wolfe the American Martin Amis?

I've hated Wolfe for a long time. Basically, starting half way through Bonfire of the Vanities, when I noticed that a) every single time a female character is introduced, we have to sit through a frankly creepy half-page description of her breasts[1], and b) that Wolfe seemed to believe that the ethnic nickname of the Irish in New York was "Harps", and that he kept on breaking off his story for some really silly jock-sniffing eulogies to the character, strength and downright manliness of anyone with Irish ancestry[2]. I thought it was a really bad book (the film was much better[4]). But anyway, every other fucker apparently liked it (though I have to say, very few actual traders, who usually love anything set in their milieu, even the appalling Ben Affleck vehicle "Boiler Room". And on the basis of that plus the "New Journalism", Wolfe has been taken seriously for a long time.

No more, I think. He's written the following blurb for a book which pupports to prove that modern American liberals are actually fascists (in other words, for a complete waste of time and paper - I have no more interest in how the author tries to make his case than in discussing the ins and outs of geocentrism. Since modern American liberals visibly aren't fascists, "engaging with the arguments" in this book is purely for the sort of people who like playing "Who's Line Is It Anyway?" type games).

In the greatest hoax of modern history, Russia's ruling "socialist workers party," the Communists, established themselves as the polar opposites of their two socialist clones, the National Socialist German Workers Party (quicknamed "the Nazis") and Italy's Marxist-inspired Fascisti, by branding both as "the fascists." Jonah Goldberg is the first historian to detail the havoc this spin of all spins has played upon Western thought for the past 75 years, very much including the present moment. Love it or loathe it, "Liberal Fascism" is a book of intellectual history you won't be able to put down—-in either sense of the term.

Hahahaha. Credibility gone.

I wish the greatest of commercial success on "Liberal Fascism". If it really takes off it will be like an infestation of herpes in the credibility of all sorts of leading right-wing commentators. The short term displeasure at seeing its author enriched is surely as nothing to the lip-smacking prospect, in four or five years' time, of being able to dismiss half the commentariat with an airy wave of the hand and a cheerful "yes, but didn't he write that embarrassing praise for 'Liberal Fascism'".

Napoleon said that when you saw your enemy making a mistake, you must never interrupt him. I wouldn't want to deprive my mates at Sadly No! of their fun, but I would really caution against being too hard on this book.

[1] I am told that this dirty-old-man tendency reached apotheosis in I am Charlotte Simmons, which I did not read because it did not get good reviews.

[2] An irritating Wolfe trope foreshadowed in "The Tangerine-Flake Baby" and the New journalism, most particularly the stock-car racing pieces, which in retrospect are chock full of bizarre racial biology theories about the "Scots Irish[3]" heritage of people in the Appalachians, and therefore of "Southern Culture" more generally.

[3] The "Scots Irish", beloved of Wolfe, PJ O'Rourke, etc, are the same people as the Ulster Protestants btw. Not a bad bunch intrinsically and all that, but I mean really, me neither.

[4] Although I have to say that when a cinematographer of the calibre of Brian de Palma casts a black actor with a wide nose, then takes a wide-angle lens and films that actor in a close-up from a position just below his face, he knows exactly what he's fucking doing and I regard it as the visual equivalent of the worst racial epithets.

John Scalzi Gets Medieval on MSNBC!!

2007-12-28T11:27:00.001-08:00

Downright shrill, in fact:

Why We’re All Going to Hell, Part 54,302: A multi-billionaire industrialist donates 97% of his fortune to help fund clean water in Africa, education for blind children, and housing for the mentally ill, and it’s presented by one of the largest news organizations in the world in terms of what it means for Paris Hilton...

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Jonah Goldberg Drives Andrew Sullivan Shrill!

2007-12-18T08:46:00.001-08:00

Sullivan writes:

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan: O Frabjous Day! 17 Dec 2007 05:36 pm: Jonah Goldberg's party might be dragging citizens off the street, incarcerating them without charges for four years and torturing them (if you haven't heard of Jose Padilla, you've been reading too much NRO), they might have suspended habeas corpus indefinitely, they might be wire-tapping your phone without warrants, they may be claiming presidential authority to ignore laws and treaties ... but the real fascism can be found in:

a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.

Be afraid.

David Corn Is Shrill!

2007-12-18T08:44:00.001-08:00

Huckabee does it to him:

Mike Huckabee: Playing Both Sides of the Pulpit: not too long ago, Huckabee was quite willing to be divisive. In a 1998 book decrying American culture, Huckabee was no seeker of common ground. He drew stark lines, equating environmentalists with pornographers and homosexuality with pedophilia and necrophilia. He also declared that people who do not believe in God tend to be immoral and to engage in "destructive behavior." He drew a rather harsh picture of an American society starkly split between people of faith and those of a secular bent, with the latter being a direct and immediate threat to the nation.

The book, Kids Who Kill: Confronting Our Culture of Violence, was hardly a call to come together. Huckabee wrote it with George Grant in response to the March 24, 1998, school shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas. The book was published in early June of that year, its cover featuring a blurry photograph of a young boy pointing a gun at the reader.

In Kids Who Kill, Huckabee argued that school shootings were the product of a society in decline, a decline marked (and caused) by abortion, pornography, media violence, out-of-wedlock sex, divorce, drug use, and, of course, homosexuality. Huckabee and his coauthor bemoaned the "demoralization of America," observing, "Despite all our prosperity, pomp, and power, the vaunted American experiment in liberty seems to be disintegrating before our very eyes." Huckabee, who was governor at the time and a well-known social conservative, blasted away at those whom he held responsible for America's ills, and he took a rather tough stand against government social programs and their advocates. In lamenting the "cultural conflicts" besetting the country, he wrote,

Abortion, environmentalism, AIDS, pornography, drug abuse, and homosexual activism have fragmented and polarized our communities.

Why was he lumping environmentalism with activities he considered sinful? He did not explain further. A few pages later, Huckabee complained,

It is now difficult to keep track of the vast array of publicly endorsed and institutionally supported aberrations—from homosexuality and pedophilia to sadomasochism and necrophilia.

Huckabee did not say what public endorsement of pedophilia or necrophilia he had in mind. But he did seem to be equating homosexuality with both.

Throughout the book, Huckabee warned of going soft on immorality. He slammed those Christians who accept a "misguided version of 'tolerance'" and do not voice outrage at cultural deterioration. Mocking such Christians, he huffed, "We don't want to offend anyone." He denounced what he termed "radical ideological secularism," and he declared, "in the name of civil liberties, cultural diversity, and political correctness, a radical agenda of willy-nilly moral corruption and ethical degeneration has pressed forward." Without identifying any secularists by name, he wailed,

The legal commitment of ideological secularism to any and all of the fanatically twisted fringes of American culture—pornographers, gay activists, abortionists, and other professional liberationists—is a pathetically self-defeating crusade that has confused liberty with license.

This is not the rhetoric of a fellow looking to heal divisions within American society. And Huckabee approvingly quoted a "pastor-patriot" of the early 1800s who said, "Every considerate friend of civil liberty, in order to be consistent with himself, must be the friend of the Bible." That's a rather fundamentalist definition of a civil libertarian.

In Kids Who Kill, Huckabee addressed the decline of manners and civil discourse in American life. He favorably cited the trenchant analysis of the modern media culture that Neil Postman, a liberal critic, presented in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death. Huckabee argued that the entertainment industry "is conditioning kids to kill." But he also groused about unnamed "modern government-sponsored social engineers," claiming that "virtually every dollar poured into" government social programs "has only made matters worse." With such a remark, he was planting himself firmly in the government-is-the-enemy camp.

Elsewhere in the book, Huckabee denounced no-fault divorce and claimed that "equality in the workplace has ironically worked against women in innumerable ways." Looking for an expert on this matter, he pointed to a 19th-century author named Peyton Moore, who once noted, "Whenever we attempt to muddy the distinctions—the God-given distinctions—between men and women, it is always the women who ultimately lose." He didn't say that women should stay at home. But he heaped scorn on those who advocate workplace equality for women.

So what to do about a culture that breeds kid killers? Faith is more important than policy or politics, Huckabee argued. The "Judeo-Christian religion," he wrote, states "that faith counteracts the destructive effects of sinful actions and activities." That's what you would expect a religious-minded person to believe. But Huckabee went further and declared that nonbelievers tend to be evildoers:

Men who have rejected God and do not walk in faith are more often than not immoral, impure, and improvident (Gal. 5:19-21). They are prone to extreme and destructive behavior, indulging in perverse vices and dissipating sensuality (1 Cor. 6:9-10). And they—along with their families and loved ones—are thus driven over the brink of destruction (Prov. 23:21).

Huckabee is certainly entitled to his religious beliefs and his own view of human nature. He is free to think that nonbelievers cannot be trusted. But should Huckabee be allowed to play both sides of the pulpit? Kids Who Kill presented a black-and-white perspective: environmentalists, homosexuals, civil libertarians, supporters of social programs, advocates of workplace equality, and nonbelievers are on the dark side and allied with the forces of decline; people who believe in the Bible are the decent Americans. In 1998, Huckabee was claiming a religion-oriented cultural war was under way in the United States and he was happy to be a warrior for his side. Now he says he wants to bring together a "polarized" society. His 1998 book—full of unforgiving rhetoric—indicates that Huckabee is more comfortable creating divides than bridging them.

Ezra Klein Is Shrill!

2007-12-06T22:03:00.001-08:00

He is shrill at New York Times columnist Tom "Airmiles" Friedman:

Ezra Klein: Better Press Corps, Etc: In some ways, I think Matt is giving Tom Friedman too much credit when he says that, "in order to reach a pox on both houses conclusion [Friedman] finds himself ignoring the very strong similarity between auctioned permit plans and carbon tax plans." I wouldn't, in this case, chalk up to ideology what I can attribute to incompetence. Instead, I'd bet that Friedman simply doesn't understand that auctioned permit plans are essentially equivalent to carbon tax plans.

This could've been caught, of course. Any expert would have noticed the misunderstanding at the heart of Friedman's argument. But no expert saw the piece before publication. So far as structural problems go in journalism, the way we do fact checking is actually a big one. Friedman's column probably went to some mid-level fact checker at The New York Times, who looked on the web sites of the various candidates, marked down that they had nothing called a "carbon tax" in their plan, and put a big checkmark on the day's Tom Friedman column. Same with Kit Seelye's piece, which went to some intern, who checked her quote and the googleability of the facts, and okayed the article.

For the sort of errors Seelye and Friedman are making to be caught, their copy would actually have to be evaluated by someone who understands the relevant policy issues. Anyone familiar with climate policy could have identified the problem with Friedman's argument, anyone with an interest in health policy, or basic statistics, could have seen the glaring methodological screw-up at the heart of Seelye's piece. But no such individuals were asked to weigh in on their pieces. Instead, the rough drafts went to the "fact checkers," who do something different and altogether less relevant.

Scott Horton on Joe Klein

2007-11-30T10:25:00.001-08:00

Scott Horton is shrill:

"Salon 1, TIME 0": the Bush Administration’s FISA apologists work feverishly to exploit the intellectually lazy. I am very surprised and very disappointed to see Joe Klein in that crowd. And disappointing as that discovery was, what followed was even worse. Time’s follow-up to the well-deserved criticism has been defensive and its concessions of factual error grudging. And all of this reflects not so much an error on the part of Klein as the Time editors. This has been an extremely bad week for Joe Klein. But it doesn’t change my positive opinion of him and his abilities. And if he’ll just give us another work of the quality of Primary Colors, I’ll forgive him entirely.

Update.... I expected a “grudging” correction. But this isn’t a correction at all, it’s an acceptance of a world of divided red and blue realities. Perhaps next Time will tell us that Republicans believe that WMDs were found in Iraq, but Democrats do not. The word for this and other excuses offered up by Klein in the last few days is simple: unprofessional. This isn’t coming from the journalist I have known and respected for so many years. Something has happened.

Time Magazine Drives Jane Hamsher Shrill!

2007-11-30T10:02:00.001-08:00

She writes:

Firedoglake - Firedoglake weblog » Honest Criticism vs. Right Wing Bullying: All Things Aren’t Equal: It’s rather shocking to see how discombobulated Time Magazine has become over the whole Joe Klein/FISA debacle. Did they learn nothing from the Washington Post’s Deborah Howell episode? If they thought they could get away with jamming their fingers in their ears and singing “la la la I can’t hear you,” the Chicago Tribune just stuck it to them by printing a genuine correction to the Klein abomination:

A Time magazine essay by Joe Klein that was excerpted on the editorial page Wednesday incorrectly stated that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act would require a court approval of individual foreign surveillance targets. It does not.

When I was calling around trying to find out what the editing process at Time was on the piece, I asked several people about how a column actually gets into print there. I’ll spare you the story of everyone sitting around the conference table pitching their ideas (”I think I’ll take the Democrats to task for being lax on national security this week…” “Oh, Joe! Such golden insights…that’s why we pay you the big money…”) and skip right to the part where everybody in the building is worried about the right wing beating them up for being too liberal.

This is a Very Serious Concern for the editorial class at Time Magazine. On the other hand, liberals such as ourselves calling out Klein for being wildly inaccurate and a dupe for Republican hacks (as well as his vanity-soaked editors, who won’t allow the magazine to acknowledge the mistake even after Klein did so himself) are considered a giant pain in the ass. It does, however, accommodate everyone’s desire to shrugs their shoulders, pat themselves on the back and conclude that if they’re being criticized by both sides they’re probably doing everything right. They then retreat to the bar and hope eventually everyone will just shut up and it will all blow over.

There is a systemic problem of perspective here. These critiques are not equal. When Greenwald called out Klein, it was based on his column’s demonstrable factual inaccuracy. Glenn is a noted First Amendment lawyer who has written two books addressing the subject of FISA law. You can’t just dismiss him by calling him a partisan and shrieking until he goes away. His analysis needs to be addressed on a point-by-point basis, and a failure to do so will get you Paul Lukasiak in your comment section.

The right wing, on the other hand, becomes incensed when someone does not subscribe to their narrative and dares to challenge (or even meaningfully question) those in authority. The Pravda-like cheerleading on behalf of the state that this encourages should be highly objectionable to every journalist interested in the perpetuation of a free press, especially since the wingnuts would like to see anyone who does not respond to that authority with basset-like obedience subjected to the annihilation of William Wallace.

Case in point. I’m on the RedState mailing list, and this is the email I got from them today:

Dear RedState Reader:

RedState is calling for CNN to fire Sam Feist, their political director; and David Bohrman, Senior Vice President and Executive Producer of the debate.

During last night’s debate, which CNN billed as “a Republican debate, and the goal was to let Republican voters see their candidates,” CNN either knowingly or incompetently allowed hardcore left wing activists to plant questions and Anderson Cooper willingly gave one of those activists a soapbox so he could harass the Republican candidates about military policy.

Simple googling would have revealed these left wing activists.

Had CNN done its homework, this would not have happened. They either willfully let it happen, or incompetently bungled it. Either way, heads should roll.

Likewise, we hope one or more of the GOP Presidential candidates will call for a do-over debate on substantive policy issues.

You can read our Directors post here.

All the best,

Erick Erickson, Editor, RedState.com

When the Democratic YouTube debates were broadcast, we were delighted by the fact that candidates were being asked honest and tough questions by real people, including right wing gun nuts. Nobody complained, we were happy that the questions weren’t being asked by media hogs who had their own agenda (see Russert, Tim). The fact that the Republicans could not stand up to that kind of discussion, which did not take place within their hermetically sealed world view, was something people predicted at the time. Last night’s embarrassment came not because of liberal questions, but rather because the GOP has an exceptionally poor lineup pandering to an extreme, delusional minority.

The Time Magazine folks can look to these bullies for their journalistic etiquette cues at their own peril. Stenography is certainly the path of least resistance these days, but the copious amounts of alcohol required to obliterate one’s professional pride in the process can be a bit hard on the internal organs.

Isaac Chotiner Becomes Even Shriller!

2007-11-27T08:47:00.001-08:00

Speaking truth appears to be becoming a habit for him:

THE NEW REPUBLIC | Blogs: Rock Bottom : Earlier I alluded to David Samuels' dreadful profile of Condoleezza Rice in The Atlantic last year, but now it seems that Samuels has topped himself with a disgraceful and incoherent piece on the state of American Jewry. After classily referring to the "less-evolved" parts of the world, Samuels jumps right into his thesis, which is that American Jews are under constant attack:

Yes, Jewish life in America remains a flowering paradise compared with the realities of being a Jew in contemporary Britain or France. But it is impossible to ignore the fact that America has changed, too. At bookstores in major airports, I am no longer surprised to be greeted by a pictures of a smiling former U.S. president comparing Israel to the loathsome apartheid government of South Africa, or a Harvard professor explaining how a small but powerful coterie of Jews is responsible for the misfortunes that have befallen America in the Middle East.

The horror, the horror--Jimmy Carter has published a bad book. Then this:

Lobbyists for AIPAC are being put on trial for the crime of gossiping with U.S. government officials over lunch, an offense of which every single foreign lobbyist in Washington--and every working journalist--is guilty. Again, the American Jewish community is silent, for fear of making things worse.

Is Samuels implying that the lobbyists were put on trial simply because they were Jewish? There is no evidence for this, but who cares? And anyway, Samuels is busy taking the entire weight of American Judaism and placing it firmly on his shoulders:

Every American Jew has been quietly putting together their own pocket-sized file of stories they would rather not tell the children. There is the story...

"Every" American Jew? That's quite an ambitious statement. Finally:

In private, I hear it is simply too painful and depressing to contemplate the idea that there will be no easy peace between Israel and the Palestinians, that American Jews have become scapegoats for popular unease about terrorism, that political anti-Semitism has become normative thought among large sectors of the global intelligentsia, or that the tension between Israel and the United States will continue to grow as a future administration seeks a way out of the present morass in Iraq and comes to terms with a nuclear-armed Iran.

One wonders who Samuels is spending his time with, and thus who is telling him these things. Regardless, it's an astonishingly bad essay.

Condi Rice and Elizabeth Bumiller Drive Isaac Chotiner Shrill!

2007-11-26T21:11:00.001-08:00

Isaac Chotiner raves:

Condi Media Watch: Today's edition comes courtesy of Elisabeth Bumiller, whose front page NYT story discusses Rice's "evolution" on the matter of U.S. engagement in Middle East peace talks. Bumiller's piece has all the hallmarks we've come to know and expect from gushing Condi profiles. First, an early sentence (which the author must know is grossly exaggerated) about Rice's committment to some particular cause:

Nearly seven tumultuous years later, Ms. Rice, as secretary of state, has led the Bush administration to a startling turnaround and is now thrusting the United States as forcefully as Mr. Clinton once did into the role of mediator between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Bumiller really believes this? Next, we have the supposed "causes" of Rice's views:

Ms. Rice’s thinking on the Middle East changed for several reasons, her aides said. She has been under increasing pressure to get involved in the peace negotiations from European and Arab leaders whose support she needs for the campaign of diplomatic and economic pressures on Iran. She considers it equally important, her aides said, to shore up the moderate leadership of Mr. Abbas, who is facing a sharp internal challenge from the more militant Hamas faction.

Then, the all-too-telling anecdote:

Ms. Rice, who had heralded the election as a symbol of the new stirrings of democracy in the Middle East, was so blindsided by the victory that she was startled when she saw a crawl of words on her television screen while exercising on her elliptical trainer the morning after the election: “In wake of Hamas victory, Palestinian cabinet resigns.”

“I thought, ‘Well, that’s not right,’” Ms. Rice recalled. When the crawl continued, she got off the elliptical trainer and called the State Department.

“I said, ‘What happened in the Palestinian elections?’” Ms. Rice recalled. “And they said, ‘Oh, Hamas won.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, Hamas won?’”

Oh dear. Finally, the belated admission that the reasons behind Rice's "maturation" are very easily explained.

Since then, Ms. Rice has made eight trips to the region, and her supporters say she remains determined against the odds. “She knows very well if she doesn’t do anything, she will be Iraq,” a European diplomat and a friend of hers said.

For the best/worst example of this sort of hagiography, be sure and check out David Samuels' profile from last year.

Paul Krugman on George W. Bush and Mark Halperin Sitting in a Tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G

2007-11-25T08:54:00.001-08:00

Paul Krugman writes:

On coming across: Why I’m not a proper political journalist:: In his op-ed today, Mark Halperin describes George W. Bush during the 2000 campaign as follows:

He came across as a man of principle who did not lust for the White House; he was surrounded by disciplined loyalists who created a cheerful cult of personality about their candidate.

Meanwhile, I didn’t do the up-close-and-personal stuff; I looked at what he actually said about policy. And from my point of view he “came across” as someone who lied, systematically and consistently, about taxes and Social Security. I did notice the cult of personality — but it scared me:

This suggests a terrible prospect. Soon we may have a president who lost the popular vote, who won the electoral vote only after bitter controversy, who needs to act with unprecedented humility and discretion to avoid ripping the country apart. But he will have surrounded himself with obsequious courtiers.

But you see, I’m just a shrill Bush-basher; we should leave judgments about character up to the professionals who thought Bush was a bluff, honest guy you’d like to have a beer with.

Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Krugman R'lyeh Wagn'nagl Fhtagn!! Krugman Fhtagn!! KRUGMAN FHTAGN!!!!

One thing worthy of note. Carlyle Group CEO David Rubenstein's reaction to George W. Bush:

David Rubenstein: you know if you said to me, name 25 million people who would maybe be President of the United States, he wouldn't have been in that category...

That was the reaction of everybody not on Bush's payroll who has met Bush I have talked to--everybody except our elite Beltway press, that is.

CNN Has Driven Josh Marshall Shrill

2007-11-17T09:21:00.001-08:00

He wants to close CNN down:

Talking Points Memo | Can We Just Close Down CNN?: Probably like a lot of people I was stunned at the amazingly lame and I'd say fairly offensive diamonds or pearls question that closed out last night's debate. I'd assumed they'd just given the last question to a complete dingbat. Seems CNN got the girl to ask that one rather than a question about Yucca Mountain. Just to be clear, I'm not above a few cutesy or fun questions. But it's a friggin' presidential debate. And don't ask the first competitive female candidate for president her jewelry preferences.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates Makes Stan Collender Shrill!

2007-11-16T11:42:00.001-08:00

Stan Collender writes:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates Sells His Soul | Capital Gains and Games: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates yesterday became the latest member of the Bush cabinet to say something that can easily be proven wrong to support the White House. As reported in the Washington Post, Gates said that a delay in getting the funds requested by the president for Iraq and Afghanistan would soon force him to start laying off employees and ceasing operations at bases. Gates should know better, and should know that someone would quickly call him out on this. A 140-year old law, the Food and Forage Act (41 U.S.C. § 11), which was put in place during the Civil War, allows the Pentagon to spend what it needs even when no appropriation has been enacted. According to law firm Holland and Knight , which published a brief note about this back in 2001:

Under the Anti-Deficiency Act (31 U.S.C. § 1341), a contracting officer is prohibited from making or authorizing an expenditure or obligation exceeding an appropriation. An exception, however, is found at 41 U.S.C. § 11, The Food and Forage Act, which permits a DoD contracting officer to incur an obligation in excess of an appropriation for food, fuel, forage and related items necessary to meet current year needs.

Gates' phony prediction of dire consequences if Congress did not provide the money requested by the White House soon was nothing more than a PR ploy. It will accomplish nothing. What's really disappointing about this is that Gates up to now has mostly tried to stay above he fray. He has acted as if his personal credibility, which his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, squandered, was vitally important to his and the military's overall success. He even seemed to break with the White House on a number of issues and took harder stances than the administration wanted him to take. This statement shows that Gates has decided that his credibility is not as important as it used to be.

David Broder Drives Matthew Yglesias Even Shriller!

2007-11-15T18:48:00.001-08:00

It is remarkable that the presses that print the Washington Post continue to run. One would think that nature itself would rebel against such unholiness:

Matthew Yglesias: "The American People": David Broder is a prominent newspaper columnist. He also obviously doesn't care for Bill Clinton. And that's what's going to happen now and again -- prominent columnist dislikes prominent politician. But for some reason instead of Broder saying that he, Broder, has some kind of problem with Clinton followed by an explanation of the nature of his beef -- an argument about Bill Clinton -- warns us darkly that "The former president's intervention" on the campaign trail in South Carolina raises "the prospect of a dual presidency" which "will test the tolerance of the American people far more severely than the possibility of the first female president -- or, for that matter, the first black president."

Broder doesn't go on to try to present any research or data to back up that claim. And why should he? After all, in this context "the American people" doesn't refer to the people who live in America, rather it means David Broder or, possibly, Broder plus some of his friends who, acting in their capacity as The Great and the Good, eschew the first person (plural or singular!) and write instead in the voice of "the American people." But the real American people like Bill Clinton, liked him throughout the impeachment farce, liked him throughout the alleged "Clinton fatigue" era, like him today, would have elected him to a third term, etc., etc. etc.

Most Americans Are Shrill!

2007-11-14T10:28:00.001-08:00

55% of voters are members of the shrill, unbalanced cult that believes that George W. Bush has committed impeachable offenses:

Think Progress » Majority believe Bush has committed impeachable offenses: A new American Research Group poll finds that 55 percent of voters believe President Bush has “abused his powers” in a manner that rises “to the level of impeachable offenses under the Constitution,” yet just 34 percent believe he should actually be impeached. Fifty-two percent say that Vice President Cheney has similarly abused his powers, with 43 percent supporting impeachment.

Paul Berman Defies Description

2007-11-12T18:21:00.001-08:00

The evil and sinister Atrios does something nobody should ever do: he forces us to read Paul Berman from 2004. Never beneath the dead, uncaring stars has so much mendacity, stupidity, disconnection from reality, and incompetence been compressed into such a small space. It is a dimension-warping singularity of horror:

Liberal hawks reconsider the Iraq war. - By Paul Berman: The war [in Iraq] was brought on... by the mass totalitarian movement of the Muslim world-—the totalitarian movement that, in its radical Islamist and Baathist wings, had fostered a cult of indiscriminate killing and suicide. The true strategic goal of such a war can only be to discourage and defeat that movement.... What would be a complete victory? The rise of liberal societies and liberal ideas. That is because the opposite of totalitarianism is liberalism. And so, our goal has had to be: to damage and discourage the Muslim totalitarians and to hearten and aid the Muslim liberals.

Are these strategic goals so impossible to see? On Sept. 10, 2001, the totalitarian wave in the Muslim world appeared to be at high tide... the most gruesome tyrannies were in power, in the name of sundry versions of the totalitarian ideology....

And today? The larger totalitarian movement in the Muslim world has been dealt two very powerful blows. The Taliban no longer rules Afghanistan and has been reduced to a guerrilla insurgency. The Baath in Iraq has likewise been reduced to a guerrilla insurgency. Some 45 million Afghanis and Iraqis, who had previously been confined to the lowest ranks of hell, are now engaged in a very tough fight—a fight in which there is at least a plausible hope of achieving a better society, animated by liberal values... liberal-minded Afghanis and Iraqis have been given a somewhat shaky boost... which can only encourage their fellow-thinkers in other parts of the Muslim world. Strategic goals? These are the strategic goals.

Why don't people understand these goals and accomplishments?... The blame, a lot of it, does fall on Bush, who... has given a very muddy picture of the reasons for war.... But some of the blame falls as well on the anti-Bush naifs who pretend not to hear when anyone speaks about the larger reasons and goals—the people who pretend that WMD and non-existent conspiracies were the only reasons for war and pretend that the only serious goals were the arrests of a couple of men, or the achieving of a magical utopia tomorrow, and pretend that if war has still not ended, we have gotten nowhere at all.... [T]he prospects of the totalitarian movement are looking a lot less healthy today than they did on Sept. 10, 2001 and the prospects of Muslim liberalism are looking up, somewhat.

Fred Kaplan writes, "Please, don't talk to me about the crack Polish division." I can't help myself—-I've got to talk about it. To see Polish troops taking part in the overthrow of Baathist tyranny is, in my eyes, hugely inspiring. No country on Earth has fought harder over the decades against totalitarianism than Poland, and the Poles are fighting now. Poland is not a rich country, and every society contributes what it can (if it chooses to contribute at all). But the Poles are contributing.... They are the enemies of totalitarianism. They... understand what so many people find difficult to understand: In Iraq as in Afghanistan, a liberal war is going on—-liberal in the philosophical sense, meaning liberty.

Andrew Sullivan Drives Ankush Shrill!

2007-11-12T09:32:00.001-08:00

Ankush writes:

Ezra Klein: Sullivan on Obama: I should've taken Charles Kaiser's advice and skipped Andrew Sullivan's cover story for The Atlantic, about how Barack Obama is the second coming of Christ. It is a stunningly bad piece of work -- reductive, overwrought, bloated, and, perhaps above all, patronizing.

The setup doubles as an example of numerous overblown passages in the piece:

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.

Needless to say, Sullivan can hardly provide actual proof for all of the steps in this argument, even if you substituted more modest adjectives for the grandiose ones he's used. But proof, in a piece like this, is beside the point. The Atlantic is giving us access to the mind of a serious thinker who is writing about Big Ideas. The exercise needn't be marred by serious reporting or self-reflection.

Nor, apparently, meaningful editing of any sort. Setting aside the sheer length -- 6,300 frequently repetitive words -- the piece is fraught with ridiculous claims. Sullivan tells us, on the issue of health care, that "[b]etween the boogeyman of 'Big Government' and the alleged threat of the drug companies, the practical differences [between the political parties] are more matters of nuance than ideology. Yes, there are policy disagreements, but in the wake of the Bush administration, they are underwhelming." This, as readers of this blog no doubt know, is not true, just like it's not true that "Democrats are merely favoring more cost controls on drug and insurance companies." (There is, after all, the small matter of universal health care.) Sullivan informs us that "[i]f Roe were to fall, the primary impact would be the end of a system more liberal than any in Europe in favor of one more in sync with the varied views that exist across this country." He seems unaware that Congress has power to regulate abortion; overturning Roe does not simply turn the issue over to the states. Sullivan tells us that "Islamist terror . . . could pose an existential danger to the West." This is just silly. Rest assured, everyone, the West will continue to exist.

Much of Sullivan's piece reads like a pitch from the candidate's camp itself: Obama, "and Obama alone," can move us beyond this unprecedentedly rancorous moment in our politics. Sullivan's uncritical embrace of this argument is not particularly surprising. As Kaiser puts it, "Barack is Andrew's latest infatuation. The fact that Sullivan's previous love objects have included Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, the war in Iraq, and unsafe sex makes this endorsement slightly less exciting for the rest of us."

The more novel part of Sullivan's argument goes like this:

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy.

...

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

It's tempting to ignore the ridiculously overblown language -- "first and foremost," "not a notch, but a logarithm," "close" to "the crudest but most effective weapon," " in ways no words can" -- but this is the argument. Sullivan doesn't give us his own account of what it is that "fuels Islamist ideology" -- like so much else, one suspects he hasn't thought it through; the casual lumping together of disparate groups with disparate motivations is the first clue -- but it's not difficult to sketch simple rejoinders to some possible claims. If they hate us because we're not fundamentalist Muslims, another Christian president, however brown-skinned, isn't going to do the trick; if they hate us because we support Israel, occupy parts of the Middle East, or otherwise do things they don't like, they might want to see some actual policy changes before they quit on the whole militancy thing at the first sight of a brown-skinned man. This isn't to say that Obama's election wouldn't be a powerful indication of progress in America's racial politics, or that this wouldn't help us somewhat on the international stage, but we see here Sullivan's tendency to take a decent idea and magnify it to a preposterous scale. (Hence, the end of AIDS.)

At bottom, however, Sullivan may simply be engaged in projection:

Earlier this fall, I attended an Obama speech in Washington on tax policy that underwhelmed on delivery; his address was wooden, stilted, even tedious. It was only after I left the hotel that it occurred to me that I’d just been bored on tax policy by a national black leader. That I should have been struck by this was born in my own racial stereotypes, of course. But it won me over.

Do his "racial stereotypes" involve non-white people being unable to talk about tax policy? In any event, others with non-aesthetic concerns (even those Islamist ideologues) will look beyond Obama's face. They may be interested, for instance, in his actual policies -- though they will need to turn to sources outside of Sullivan's piece to learn anything about them.

The remarkable thing here is that I'm an admirer of Obama's, so I'm hardly opposed to people writing about how much they like him. But The Atlantic can do better than this -- much better than this. I remain baffled as to why purportedly serious publications treat Sullivan with such high regard.

The Economic Analyses of David Malpass Claim Another Victim

2007-11-09T17:01:00.001-08:00

Barry Ritholtz is shrill:

The Big Picture | Quote of the Day: Malpass (WTF?) on the Dollar : In the WSJ Op-ed section today, David Malpass seems ti be having a hard time figuring out why the Greenback is in trouble.

He's our Quote of the Day:

Dollar weakness is neutralizing the positive effects of the Federal Reserve's interest-rate cuts. As the dollar spirals downward, weakened by Washington's indifference and market expectations of more rate cuts, liquidity drains from the U.S. into inflation hedges like gold and, in the case of entrepreneurship and risk-taking capital, to countries with strengthening currencies. This drain undercuts the growth impact of the Fed's recent rate cuts, complicating the recovery from the August credit-market turbulence. Question: What's harder to sell than a complex loan during a credit crunch? A dollar-denominated one.

No, no, no, no, no!

Its not the that Fed cuts are being neutalized by the weak dollar -- its the Fed cuts are CAUSING THE WEAK DOLLLAR.

(Yes, I am getting shrill)

Always Lowering the Level of the Debate, Aren't You Kevin?

2007-11-05T15:02:00.001-08:00

Kevin Drum has decided to run a worst weblog post of all time contest:

The Washington Monthly: All-Time Wingnuttiest Blog Post Contest:

While the rest of the blogosphere concerns itself with the worthy task of choosing the all-time best blog posts, I'm keeping my focus where it belongs: on the all-time worst blog posts. And thanks to help from my commenters, plus commenters over at FDL and John Cole's place, we now have an official list of nominees.

A note on methodology: Several prose stylings that seem like they ought to be on the ballot missed out because intensive research by the PA staff determined that they weren't actually blog posts. "Objectively pro-terrorist" deserves recognition, for example, but it came from a Michael Kelly column, not a blog post. Ditto for "The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead — and may well mount a fifth column," which Andrew Sullivan wrote for the Sunday Times, not his blog. Or John Derbyshire's musings on women over the age of 20. And "Lucky Duckies" was a Wall Street Journal editorial. Since this contest is all about blog wingnuttery, these contenders were sadly but firmly disqualified....

All-Time Wingnuttiest Blog Post Contest...

Ann Althouse: "Let's take a closer look at those breasts."

Steven Den Beste (shortly before the Iraq war started): "It's the waiting that wears."

John Derbyshire (after the Virginia Tech shootings): "Where was the spirit of self-defense here?....It's not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons."

Ben Domenech: "Pachyderms in the Mist"

Kim du Toit: "The Pussification of the Western Male"

Pam "Atlas Shrugs" Geller: "My Sharia!"

Jonah Goldberg (before Katrina): "Attn: Superdome Residents....grow gills...."

Robert Hahn: "I will suggest that President Bush understands money better than any President we have ever had."

Hugh Hewitt: "I'm sitting in the Empire State Building...."

John Hinderaker: "It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius...."

Michelle Malkin: "The Defeatocrats Cheer"

Glenn Reynolds: "Maybe we should rise above the temptation to point out that claims of a 'quagmire' were wrong....Nah."

Lee Siegel: "The Origins of Blogofascism"

Bill Whittle (after Katrina): "Tribes"

Unfortunately, U.S.S. Clueless author Steven den Beste is attempting to rig the contest by cutting off access to his entry--whether in the hopes of winning or losing or even what "winning" and "losing" this contest really mean not being clear. But here is a flavor:

USS Clueless - The guiding philosphy behind the EU: Just what, exactly, is the European Union really supposed to be?... The answer is that the purpose of the European Union is to roll back the post-war experiment in western Europe with capitalist representative democracy, and to restore Europe to its rightful place at the center of the world's stage by displacing the US as the predominant power in the world. The driving motivation behind it is a religious belief, along with a nostalgia for past greatness, profound distrust of the masses, and resentment of American power and influence, as well as outright fear of what America might decide to do with its unprecedented position in the world....

Out of [American intervention in WWII and NATO], Western Europe got fifty years of freedom, peace and rising prosperity. I know of no case in history of a military occupation which was as benign and beneficial to the occupied nations. But there was a price to be paid. Europe got freedom, peace, prosperity, but also apathy, decadence and insignificance. It paid the price in a drastic reduction of power and prestige.... There is no better way to make a proud man hate you than to give him charity and assistance and for him to know that he must rely on it. He may be grateful for each individual act of kindness, but he will resent his dependency and hate you for constantly reminding him of his weakness....

Added to this was a secular religion called Marxism, which had strongly influenced European political thought for the previous hundred years and which remained powerful and persuasive for some, who clung to it with a fervor usually seen in the most die-hard fundamentalists of Christianity or Islam.... Extremist Muslims have come to hate the US not only because our way of life and our beliefs are nearly diametrically opposite to what their religion says is a virtuous life, but also because we're drastically more successful than they are. America is a living heresy; we live lives filled with sin, and somehow or other we seem to escape the punishment of Allah (though there's always hope for tomorrow if only they pray hard enough). There can, of course, be only one explanation: we're being protected by Satan. And thus opposition to the US is a holy war, because America is blasphemy just by existing.

And to orthodox Marxists, America is also blasphemy. Our capitalist system refuses to self-destruct the way Marx predicted it would. America found an answer to the problem Marx identified.... And so it is that European Socialists hate America for the same reason the Muslim extremists do: This isn't what The Prophet said would happen. We were promised that we would win!...

And here is Steven den Beste in the Wall Street Journal:*

From the Wall Street Journal editorial page: There's another year and a half in Mr. Bush's current term, and by the end of it [November 2006], [Iraq] will either be a complete shambles or else it will clearly be on the road to success, and I think it's unlikely to be a shambles.... [I]f there's anything you should know about Americans by now, it's that we're problem solvers.... We stuck with the occupations of Germany and Japan for 50 years. I feel confident we'll stick with this, too.

Much of the reputation we've gained in the world comes from how we act when we're not challenged. There's steel in us, too, but we don't show it much. It only really comes out in war, and when we've been at peace for several decades there's a tendency to think that we used to have that kind of steel, but that we don't any longer. That's wrong, and every generation the world learns that anew. Going into World War II, many in Europe said that Americans used to be willing to fight back in the days of Lincoln but had become decadent and soft. History proves otherwise, of course.

That steel is still there, it's just that we don't feel any need to show it when it isn't needed. But when the issues are sufficiently important to us, we'll still make major sacrifices. The memory of 9/11 runs deep. I'm becoming convinced that few in Europe truly understand just what that really meant to us, the anger and the hatred it raised. It's not the kind of thing we get over. We're not going to forget it. We haven't forgotten Pearl Harbor, either. That doesn't mean we consider Japan an enemy, but it does mean that we did what we needed to in order to make sure Japan would never do anything like that to us again. When we truly decide to solve a problem, we try to solve it permanently. And we're not going to forget 9/11. On some level or another, it's going to be a major political issue here for the next few decades, until we're convinced that the danger is gone. Arab extremism is no longer something that happens a long ways away and that we can ignore, so we aren't going to. It is their problem, but 9/11 made it ours. Now we'll solve it....

[T]he one thing we're not going to do is to surrender. We'll try to solve this as humanely as we can, but solve it we must, and I believe that this nation will do whatever it needs to in order to remove the danger facing it. If an American city gets nuked by a terrorist, things are going to get extremely ugly. So even America-haters in Europe had better hope that this works, because the alternative is much worse. (Which is a really good reason why they'd also better stop trying to make it fail.)

Right now the Democrats are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, in thrall to their extreme wing, and trying to peddle a message full of recriminations. But they'll soon realize that their message of hatred, panic and shame isn't selling to the majority of voters here, and they'll either fade into political insignificance for the next 20 years, or (far more likely) the idiots will get marginalized and more-practical voices will emerge. Within a year, the argument will no longer be about whether we should have gone in. It will be about what we should do next.

The Democrats won't have any influence until they actually look toward the future and start talking about what they think we actually should do. Bitching about what actually happened will get them headlines, but it isn't ultimately going to get them enough votes to win. And I think that they know it...

It's time to turn over the microphone to Daniel Davies:

D-squared Digest -- FOR bigger pies and shorter hours and AGAINST more or less everything else: [P]eople don't necessarily want a Smarter Stephen den Beste. Part of the joy is watching a man who knows nothing about anything except the innards of mobile phones trying to understand a complicated world around him with no sources of information other than the Internet. What people want is a Shorter Stephen den Beste; one that doesn't take about ten thousand words to get from A to halfway through the downstroke of B. So I'll be posting one-sentence summaries of posts on the USS Clueless, on a reasonably regular basis, until I get bored. Here's today's batch:

I've never served in uniform.

My dislike of the French is independent of any facts about the world.

Canadian Tax Cut Stupidity

2007-10-31T03:06:00.001-07:00

Conservatives drive Stephen Gordon to shrillness:

Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: The federal government's proposed tax cuts are just as stupid as we'd feared: The federal government's proposed tax cuts are just as stupid as we'd feared

Sigh. The Conservatives set out an Economic Statement this afternoon, and it includes a measure to further reduce the Goods and Services Tax (GST) from 6% to 5%. From this, I infer that the Conservative government is willfully stupid:

* Reducing the GST is bad economics. Just ask anyone who has given any thought to the matter.
* Reducing the GST is bad - or at best, pointless - politics. Just ask voters.

Now, I can understand that the Conservatives are in the business of cutting taxes. But the intelligent way of implementing that agenda involves cutting stupid taxes and keeping (or even increasing) smart taxes. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be the Conservative way of implementing this agenda. According to Table A.1 on this page, the GST cut accounts for over 60% of the reduction in taxes over the next five years. Stupid, stupid, et cetera.

Okay, yes, they are accelerating the previously-announced rate at which the federal government would be reducing corporate taxes (Table A.2 from the same page), and that's a good thing. But it's not enough to dispel the odour of ideologically-driven amateurism.

Shrill Laffering

2007-10-31T02:41:00.001-07:00

This is relatively shrill, but not shrill enough:

Economist's View: A Convenient Lie: As soon as you read this from Pete Du Pont:

Inconvenient Tax Truths: Al Gore believes global warming is "an inconvenient truth." Here are some economic truths that America's liberal leadership finds too inconvenient to support. ... Tax rate reductions increase tax revenues. This truth has been proved at both state and federal levels, including by President Bush's 2003 tax cuts on income, capital gains and dividends. Those reductions have raised federal tax receipts by $785 billion.

There's no need to read any further, he's revealed himself (yet again) as a political hack. The saddest part is that some people actually believe these lies.

It's also too bad that under Rupert Murdoch the Wall Street Journal's editorial page has continued to print these lies to support an ideology, lies that helped to push through tax cuts that did not raise revenues by $785 billion or at all, but instead lowered revenues by hundreds of billions of dollars according to Congressional Budget Office estimates.

And Matthew Yglesias and Dave Roberts Are the Light-Bringers of the Shrill!

2007-10-30T20:45:00.001-07:00

Matthew writes, apropos of French President Sarkozy's embrace of carbon taxes:

Matthew Yglesias: Sarkozy Hearts Carbon Tax: French President Nicholas Sarkozy calls for a carbon tax for France. Dave Roberts notes: "U.S. right-wingers like to use Sarkozy as a rhetorical bludgeon, showing that Europe is moving toward the U.S. rather than vice versa. I wonder if this will cause any of their little pea brains to short-circuit." Probably not. The capacity to sustain massive cognitive dissonance is part of the job.

Shrillblog

Call me "Rip"

Christy Romer Joins the Order of the Shrill

Ryan Avent Joins the Order of the Shrill

David Brooks is Shrill!

James Kwak: A Partisan Post: You Have Been Warned!

Dean Baker, Yog-Sothoth Professor of Political Economy at Miskatonic University, on the Washington Post and the Stimulus

Miskatonic University Bulletin: Fall 2009

David Frum is Shrill!

Joe Klein is losing it

Nonpartisan Tax Professor Dan Shaviro Is Now Shrill!

Spencer Ackerman's Sober, Measured Take on John Yoo

Tom Levenson, Driven into Shrillness by Tom Friedman Once More...

And...

Shrillblog: The Israeli Edition

Karl Rove is Shrill?

Republicans are Shrill!

Barry Ritholtz Is Shrill!!

"He Doesn't Seem Like a Serious President"

Kevin Drum Is Shrill

"I am Not Paid Enough to Deal with This Lying bullshit"

I HATE YELLING SHOWS!!!!

John Scalzi: Goldberg and Bainbridge: A Compare and Contrast

Washington Post Death Spiral Watch

Hilzoy Speaks Ill of the Living

The Abyss Has Drilled Fracking Laser Holes in Our Skulls with Its Stare...

Marty Lederman Gets Shrill on John Yoo

Joe Klein Is Shrill!!

Joe Klein Is Shrill!!

Stupidest Man Alive: Patrick J. Buchanan

Jim Henley: Why the Republican Party Must Be Destroyed

Spencer Ackerman Looks at the Bushies

Ben on the Asteroid Menace of Gregg Easterbrook (June 16, 2008) - The Asteroid Menace (Domestic Policy)

The Stages of Recovery from the Bush Presidency

The Poor Man on the John Yoo Situation

Matthew Yglesias Is Shrill!

Felix Salmon's Ben Stein Watch: April 27, 2008

Paul Krugman Tells Us to Go Read Joe Klein from 2005

Justin Logan Is Shrill!

Robert Waldmann's Shrillness Threatens to Destroy the Universe

Willed to Shrillnes

TBogg Is Shrill!

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Him Now

Paul Berman Is a Deeply Broken Person

Glenn Greenwald Is Super-Shrill!

Hilzoy Is Shrill!

McCain: Clueless as... as... Saying that Some Neo-Confederate Group Is Secretly Funneling Money to Louis Farrakhan

Thoreau Is Shrill. Really Shrill

Brendan Nyhan: Chris Matthews: Ignorant about policy

Cactus: We Don't Live in a Meritocracy, Exhibit A

Hilzoy Is Shrill!

Sadly, the Shrillness Begins

Roy Edroso Is Shrill!

Helicopter Spin

Kevin Drum is Shrill

No, National Review Is Not Better than It Used to Be

Eric Boehlert: Poetic justice: Limbaugh tries to tear GOP apart

Marty Lederman: Lowering the Bar: Well, At Least We're Not as Barbaric as the Spanish Inquisition

David Weman Is Shrill!

Matthew Yglesias Is Shrill!

Wingnut Hax of the Gamma Quadrant!

Felix Salmon Is Really Shrill

If George Bush Will Be Long-Rememebered, Will the Shrillness Ever End?

Susan Faludi Is Shrill

Jonathan Schwarz on the U.N. Deception: What Exactly Colin Powell Knew Five Years Ago, and What He Told the World

Matthew Yglesias Is Shrill!

Kung Fu Monkey Is Hypershrill!

James Wolcot Is Shrill

Duncan Black Is Shrill!

Blind Sputtering Fury

Duncan Black Is Shrill!

Virginia Postrel's Allergic Reaction to Ron Paul

New York Times Death Spiral Watch

Hilzoy on the Party of Moral Values and Limited Government

Spencer Ackerman Is Shrill!

John Scalzi Is Shrill!

Self-Shrillness from John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei

Stupidest Man Alive Nomination

TBogg Reads National Review So We Don't Have to

Steve Suh is Shrill!!

I HATE YELLING

SHOWS!!!!